Slave And Citizen

VERS

< OU 154569

Qi —

00 =

73 <
> m

73

OSMANU UNIVERSTTY LIBRARY

Call Xlk> Accession No. ;

Auttor

Title 0-\Vu^<i_Vk

This book should be returned on oH)efOfe the date
last marked below.

SLAVE AND CITIZEN

SLAVE

and Citizen

‘I he Negro in the <iAmericas

FRANK TANNENBAUM

Alfred A. Knopf New York 1947

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1^46 by Alfred A, Knopf y Inc. All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be reproduced in any form ^without permission in
writing from the publisher y except by a reviewer who may quote brief
passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manu-
factured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in
Canada by The Ryerson Press.

PUBLISHED JANUARY 9, 1 947
SECOND PRINTING, JUNE 1 947

To J.B.T.

INTRODUCTION

<iAs I look at this little book upon a great subject
I find that I am more unhappy no’w that it is
finished than 1 was when writing it. It raises
more questions ^ by implication at leasts than it
answers. <JLnd the questions it raises are those
that trouble our own day. They are questions of
freedom^ liberty y justice y laWy and morality. Jill
of them revolve about the place of man in the
world and the relation of men to each other.
Slavery was not merely a legal relation; it was
also a moral one. It implied an ethical bias and
a system of human valueSy and illustrated more
succinctly y perhaps y than any other human expe-
rience the significance of an ethical philosophy.
For if one thing stands out clearly from the study
of slavery y it is that the definition of man as a
moral being proved the most important influ-
ence both in the treatment of the slave and in
the final abolition of slavery. Once it was be-
lieved that all men are free by nature and equal
in the sight of Qody once the doctrine of the spir-
itual identity of all meuy slave or freey came to
rule merPs minds and condition their legal sys-

tem^ then the very nature of slavery came to re-
flect the accepted doctrine.

The idea of the moral value of the individual
outlasted slavery and became the chief source of
its undoing. This belief has persisted throughout
the last tvoo thousand years. It is the chief herit-
age of the Wes tern ^ the European worlds and the
very survival off European culture — perhaps of
the European man — depends upon the survival
of this doctrine. If it were to be losty the Euro-
pean scheme of values would be lost with it.

T here is in the history of slavery an important
contribution to the theory of social change.
Wherever the law accepted the doctrine of the
moral personality of the slave and made possible
the gradual achievement of freedom implicit in
such a doctrine.^ the slave system was abolished
peacefully. Where the slave was denied recogni-
tion as a moral person and was therefore consid-
ered incapable of freedom, the abolition of slav-
ery was accomplished by force — that is, by
revolution. The acceptance of the idea of the
spiritttal equality of all men made for a friendly,
an elastic milieu within which social change
could occur in peace. On the other hand, where
the slave was denied a moral status, the law and

Introduction

IX

the mores hardened and became stratijiedy and
their historical outcome proved to be violence
and revolution, 'But the bearing upon social pol-
icy and social change of the idea of the moral
equality of all men voould require a much longer
book than the one here offered to the reader.

Columbia University

Frank Tannenbaum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like every book, this one is a child of its own time,
and the author’s indebtedness is much wider than he
ca;’i specify. Indirectly but immediately the study
stems from a seminar on the history of slavery in the
Western World, first given at Columbia University
in 1938-9 by Professors William L. Westermann,
Geroid T. Robinson, John A. Krout, and the author.
This seminar has proved important because it brought
to bear upon a common theme the historical experi-
ence of different cultures, and especially because it
was the first attempt at what has since become at
Columbia, the University Seminars, of which there
are now five, in the fields of Religion, the State, Peace,
the Renaissance, and Rural Life and Education. These
seminars attempt to integrate all of the disciplines
and experience that relate to a given institution or to
a given field of knowledge.

I also wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to
Lyman Bryson and to Professors Charles W. Cole
and Robert Livingston Schuyler.

I am under obligation to Mrs. Dorothea Board-
man for getting the book ready for press.

SLAVE AND CITIZEN

SLAVE AND CITIZEN

'The N E G R o m the a/tmericas

KjrtHE settling of the Western Hemisphere by
^ peoples coming from Europe and Africa was
v* an adventure on a grand scale, involving
diverse peoples, varying cultures, millions of human
beings, and hundreds of years. The common element
was the New World, though strangely dissimilar in
physical features and cultural type. But the student
discerns many an analogous design, patterned by the
newcomers as they established themselves in the
strange and unexplored regions. It is natural, there-
fore, for Gilberto Freyre to mark revealing identities
between the history of Brazil and that of the United
States.^ Like everything that Gilberto Freyre writes,
Brazil: An Interpretation has a freshness and lucidity
that endow the reader with insight and understanding
of the complex instrumentalities for life and labor
contrived by man in his new world. Freyre finds,
among other similarities in the development of Brazil,
the impact of the frontier and the dominion of the
plantation so typical of our own South. The disparity

^ Gilberto Freyre: Brazil: An Interfretation (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf; 1945).

4 Slave and Citizen:

implied rather than expressed in the study is the di-
vergent position of the Negro within the two areas.
For in Brazil the Negro, and especially the mulatto,
had an access to the culture and a role in social life un-
known in the United States. In politics, in the arts,
and in society the mulatto found the door ajar, even
if not fully open, and a markedly different social
milieu has come into being. Even under the Empire
the Negro and the mulatto — and, socially, the attrac-
tive mulatto women — had an acceptance unthink-
able in the American scene. Freyre quotes from
Ewbank this revealing picture:

I have passed black ladies in silks and jewelry, with male
slaves in livery behind them. Today one rode past in her car-
riage, accompanied by a liveried footman and a coachman.
Several have white husbands. The first doctor of the city is a
colored man ; so is the President of the Province.*

In another place® he points out that gentlemen of
dark color achieved the dignity of president of the
cabinet under the Emperor.

A social atmosphere so dissimilar in two nations
built in the New World by immigrants from the Old
challenges analysis. It cannot be a mere accident. The
way these two societies have gone must have an ex-
plainable etiology, and an examination of the source
of the difference may illumine the present.

^ Thomas Ewbank: Lije in Brazily or th$ Land of the Cocoa
and the Palm (London, 1856), p. 266.

* Gilberto Freyre, op. cit., p. loi.

T^he Negro the aAmericas 5

We are really concerned with one of the major race
and population problems of the Western Hemi-
sphere. The Negro is found everywhere in this hemi-
sphere except Greenland, and there are regions where
he is so numerous" that long ago Humboldt spoke of
a possible colored empire in the Caribbean. From Rio
de Janerio northwards, the coastal stretches of Brazil,
French, Dutch, and British Guiana, Venezuela, Co-
lombia on both the Atlantic and the Pacific, Ecuador,
and Peru have significant and in certain districts pre-
ponderant numbers of people of African origin. This
same holds true for both coasts in Central America.
In Mexico the Negro on the coastal plains has largely
merged with the Indian population, but even here
traces of African influence are still visible, while our
Southern states, bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, the
Mississippi, and the Atlantic, have a colored popula-
tion of many millions, which in some rural sections
outnumbers the whites. Even Canada and Alaska
have a fraction of Negroes in their population. It is
on the islands in the Caribbean, however, rather than
on the mainland of North or South America, that the
Negro has acquired a dominating place. If Hum-
boldt’s reference is taken in a demographic rather
than a political sense, the colonization of the Western
Hemisphere has involved the settlement of many
thousands of square miles by peoples come from
Africa rather than from Europe, and if we draw an
arc from Rio de Janeiro to Washington, D.C., and

6 Slave Citizen:

include the West Indian islands within it, we shall
have, in outline, the empire Humboldt talked about.

The enumeration of the colored people in the
Western Hemisphere can be only approximate. The
definition of Negro and mulatto varies in diflFerent
countries} the census records are incomplete in some,
and out of date in others. But in spite of that, even a
rough estimate will help fix the magnitude of the
problem. There are more than 13,000,000 Negroes
in the United States, or 12 per cent of the total popu-
lation. Humboldt, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, adjudged the colored population of all the
Antilles at 2,360,000, or 83 per cent of the total.* The
more immediate record reveals the British, French,
and Dutch possessions and the Virgin Islands as al-
most completely colored. Of the largest islands, Barba-
dos, with 174,774, has 7 per cent white} Jamaica,
with perhaps a million, only 2 per cent of full Euro-
pean stock} and Trinidad, with 387,425, perhaps 4
per cent Caucasian. Of all the other British West
Indies, only one, St. Kitts, with 1 8,730 people, has as
many as 6 per cent white. The rest have less than 5
per cent. (Nevis, the Virgin Islands, and Grenada
have only i per cent of their population, or less,
white.) * One thing is clear: that the British West

* Alexander Humboldt: The Island of Cuba^ translated from
the Spanish by J. S. Thrasher (New York, 1856), p. 186.

* W. M. Macmillan: Warning from the West Indies (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber j 1936), p. 186,

It he Negro in the tAmericas y

Indies belong demographically to people of African
rather than European origin. These same conditions
prevail in the French and Dutch Caribbean islands.
Martinique, out of a population of over 240,000, has
between three and four thousand whites.® Very simi-
lar conditions prevail in Guadeloupe^ and in the
minor islands. The Dutch islands, including Curasao,
have between 80 per cent and 90 per cent Negro and
mulatto.®

Only Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo are
not completely dominated by the colored race. For
reasons too complex to explain here, these areas were
retained, in part at least, as a European habitat. In
Santo Domingo the white population is said to be 13
per cent of the total, the Negro 19 per cent, and the
rest mixed,® whereas Cuba, in spite of the fact that
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century it had
more Negroes and mulattoes than whites, counts
at present about 27 per cent colored out of a popula-
tion of about four million.^® While Puerto Rico has
25.7 per cent colored,^^ the population of Haiti is al-

® Raye R. Platt, John K. Wright, John C. Weaver, and John-
son E. Fairchild: The Eurofean Possessions in the Caribbean Area
(New York: American Geographical Society; 1941), p. 53,

^ Ibid., p. 60. ® Ibid., p. 74.

® Refugee Settlement in the Dominican Refublic (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Brookings Institution; 1942), p. 86.

Problems of the New Cuba (New York: Foreign Policy As-
sociation; 1935), p. 27.

U. S. Census of 1930, Outlying Territories and Possessions^
Table 2, p. 136.

8 Slave and Citizen:

most completely colored. The proportion of Euro-
pean population in the Guianas is only fractional, and
the Negro and mulatto population of Brazil is very
large. The identification of the mulatto as white, and
the tendency to speak of the Negro as being whitened
out in Brazil, make most contemporary statements
misleading. But we do have some historical evidence
that tells its own tale. In 1817 there were, out of a
population of 3,617,900, only 843,000 whites and
2,887,500 Negro freedmen and slaves, not to count
another 628,000 mestizos — which in this case means
mixtures of whites, Negroes, and Indians. The rest
were pure Indians.^* This was before the very large
importation of Negroes between that date and 1850,
which has been estimated at between three and five
million. In 1884 the number of slaves is given as

3.000. 000.^® Even Simonsen, who tends to understate
the importance of the Negro slave in Brazil, says that
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were

1.000. 000 employed in sugar, 600,000 in mining,
250,000 in coffee, and i, 100,000 in other employ-
ments.®*

The Argentine, which boasts of being pure Euro-
pean, would merely forget the record. For more than

Balbi: ^^Essai statistique sur le Royaume de Portugdy^
quoted in Roberto C. Simonsen: Hhtoria Economica do Brasil
I £00— 1820 (Sao Paulo, 1937), Vol. II, p. 56.

Sir Harry Johnston: TAe Negro in the New World (Lon-
don: Methuen & Co.; 1910), p. 98.

Roberto C. Simonsen, op. cit., p. 205.

Hhe Negro in the Jtmericas 9

two and a half centuries the Negro was an important
element in the total population. The number of Ne-
groes in Argentina cannot be accurately known be-
cause of the absence of records and because of the
extensive smuggling. Buenos Aires had become a port
of illegal entry of Negro slaves on their way to Peru
and, we must presume, to Argentina as well. One
item alone tells a significant tale. In the port of Buenos
Aires, for only the twenty years 1606-25, 8,925 Ne-
groes of illegal entry were denounced, and, when
sold., produced 1,384,709 pesos, of which the crown
received 745,443 pesos as its share, the rest going to
the informers and to the judges.^® This little item il-
luminates an entire social complex and makes under-
standable assertions so often repeated that all work
is done by the Negroes as the whites will do none
of it.

In 1634 the cabildo of Buenos Aires instructed its
agent in Madrid to ask for permission for travelers
to Peru, Tucuman, or Chile to take Negro servants
with them as there were no Indians in Buenos Aires
that could be used for that purpose.^® Father Carlos
Gervasoni, of the Order of Jesus, writing in 1729,
estimates the number of people in the city of Buenos
Aires at 24,000, and says that at least one third of that

Manuel Ricardo Trelles: *‘Hernandarias de Saavedra,” La
Revista de Buenos AireSy T. IX (Buenos Aires, 1866), p. 424.

^Hnstruccion que el Cabildo de Buenos Aires remite a su
afoderado en Madrid y'* La Revista, op. cit., T. VI, p. 136,

10

Slave and Citizen:

number are African Negro slaves. “Our college alone
will have over three hundred.” All things pass
through their hands, because there is not a Spaniard
here, no matter “how miserable,” who will not put on
“a wig and a sword.” At about the same time Father
Cayetano Cattaneo says that “These [the Negroes]
are the only ones in all of these provinces who serve
in the houses, work in the fields, and at all of the other
trades. If it were not for the slaves, it would not be
possible to live here, for no Spaniard, no matter how
poor, will . . . serve. . . . They do all . . . and
are . . . excellent craftsmen [in building], so that
Buenos Aires is taking on such a form that the Euro-
peans will not be able to look down upon her with dis-
dain.”

Father Chome,” of the Order of Jesus, tells us that

Father Carlos Gervasoni: ^^Carta al Padre Comint de la
Comfania de Jesus^^ La RevistCy op. cit., T. VIII, pp. 177—8.

'^Carta del Padre Cayetano Cattaneo, abril, 1750,” ibid.,
pp. 315-6, 319.

Cartas Edijicantes, y Curiosas, Escritas de las Misiones Es-
tr anger as, y de Levante for Algunos Missioneros de la Comfania
de Jesus, traducidas por el Padre Diego Davin, de la Misma Com-
pahia. T. XIII (Madrid, 1756), p. 300. ^^Carta del Padre Chome,
Seft. 1730, Missionero de la Comfania de Jesus, al Padre Van-
thiennen, de la Misma Comfanicd'* :

^^Habia en Buenos Ayres mas de veinte mil Negros, y Negras,
d quienes faltaba toda instruccidn, forque no sabian la Lengua
Esfanola. Como los mas eran de Angola, Congo, y Loango, me did
gana de af render la Lengua de Angola, la qual estd en uso en
dichos tres Reynos. Salt con mi emfeno, y en menos de tres meses

Hhe Negro in the ^Americas 1 1

he spent a year in Buenos Aires learning the African
tongues and evangelizing the Negroes, who did not
know Spanish, and he estimates them at 20,000 —
a number that, if correct, would place the colored
population at well over half of the total, as the city at
that time had less than 40,000 inhabitants.

In 1773*“ in Tucaman all the houses had large
numbers of Negro slaves, and in Cordoba a thousand
slaves were sold from only two haciendas owned by
religious houses. Among these Negroes were many
musicians, and others skilled in all of the various
crafts. The Convent of Saint Theresa had a ranch
with 300 male and female slaves, while many private
houses had as many as thirty or forty slaves.

The first census of the Republic of Argentina cites
the formal record of 1778, indicating that one third
of the population consisted of people of color, while
de Moussy gives 6,000 for Buenos Aires in 1770, out
of a total population of 22,000, and 7,000 for Cordoba
in 1778. The total estimated by de Moussy ** is 30,-
000 for all of Argentina in that period. But, what-

fne fuse en esiado de otr sus confession es^ tratar con ellos, y ex^
flicarles todos los Domingos la Doctrina Christiana en nuestra
IglesiaP

‘‘El Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes,” originally published
in 1773. Biblioteca de Cultura Peruana, Ser. I, No. 6 (Paris,
1938), p. 66.

Primer Censo, de la Refublica Argentina (Buenos Aires,
1872), p. 10.

V. Martin de Moussy: Description ... de la Confederor
tion Argentine, Vol. II (Paris, i860), p. 239.

12 Slave and . Citizen:

ever the exact nvimber, it is clear that the Negroes
were numerous and important. They not only did all
of the physical labor about the houses and towns, were
the craftsmen in building and other crafts, but became
important in the rural districts as “gauchos.^* A colored
or mulatto gaucho appears in the literature and in the
traveler’s accounts, and we find Gillespie writing
of a certain hacendado who owned 60,000 head of
cattle, and eighty Negroes who did nothing but de-
vote their time to the care of his cattle. Don Francisco
de Aguirre** tells us that in 1783 “almost all the
people of service are slaves,” and in 1852 Sir Wood-
bine Parish*' writes: “The porters, carters, carriers,
drivers, and all of the washerwomen of Buenos
Aires are free Negroes and Mulattoes.” In 1815, in
Corrientes, “Some of the ladies brought mulatillasy
little female slaves with them} and, these either re-
mained at the door, looking in upon the company, or

Major Alexander Gillespie: Gleanings and Remarks, Col-
lected during Many Months of Residence at Buenos Ayres and
within the Vffer Country (Leeds, 1818), p. 144.

** “Diario de Don Francisco de Aguirre" Anales de la Bibli-
oteca, T. IV, L. 3, Cap. 2 (Buenos Aires, 1900), p. 173.

Sir Woodbine Parish: Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of
the Rio de la Plata: from their discovery and conquest by the
Spaniards to the establishment of their political independence.
With some account of their present state, trade, debt, etc. ; an ap-
pendix of historical and statistical documents; and a description
of the geology and fossil monsters of the pampas (London: J.
Murray; 1852, 2nd Edition), p. 56.

T^he'^'EQKO in tlie z/lmericas 13

if very young, squatted at their mistress’s feet in the
room.” *•

Toward the end of the colonial period, Venezuela,
in a population of approximately 1,000,000, had 72,-
000 Negro slaves and 400,000 mulattoes, or some-
thing over 47 per cent of African origin.*’ There were
few in Paraguay, perhaps less than 2 per cent of the
total population.*® Chile at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century had 30,000 Negroes and mulattoes
out of a population of about half a million,*® whereas
in Peru there were well over 100,000 just at the end
of the eighteenth century,*® while in what is now
Ecuador there were 50,000, and in Colombia, 210,-
000 .®^

While statistical tables of racial composition in the
population are always misleading, at least in the sense
that they give an impression of finality that they do
not possess, they are, when carefully done, somewhat

J. P. and W. P. Robertson: Letters on South America^ Com^
f rising Travels on the Banks of the Parana and Rio de la Piatdy
Vol. I (London, 1843), p. 56.

Arcaya: E studios de Sociologia Venezuelam, p. 470.

Natalicio Gonzalez: Proceso y Formacion de la Cultura
Paraguay a (Buenos Aires, i 93 o)> P* 3 ^*

Domingo Amunategul Solor: ^^La Trata de Negros en
Chilef* Revista Chilena de Historia y Geogrdfica, Vol. XLIV (Oc-
tober 1922), p. 39.

Ricardo Donoso: El Mesrques de Osorno don Anibrosio Hig*
ginsy 1^20^1 80 1 (Santiago de Chile, 1941), p. 465.

Jose Manuel Restrepo: Historia de la Revolucion de la
Refublica de Colombia (10 vols., Paris, 1827), Vol. I, p. 216.

14 Slave and Citizen:

useful as a source of reference. The following table
will help summarize and make graphic the magni-
tude of the problem we are here considering.

The sum of these figures amounts to 41,140,719
people of color in the Western Hemisphere. Even if
only relatively accurate, they are sufficiently impres-
sive to call for a reconsideration of the role of the
African people in this hemisphere. The settlement of
America was not a purely European enterprise. It is
more accurately described as a common undertaking
by the folk coming from both Europe and Africa. For
the slave trade is better viewed as a migratory move-
ment — forced migration, if you will, but still one of
the greatest population movements of all time. This
movement stretched over more than four centuries
(1442-1880) and was integrally related to the colo-
nization of large parts of the Western Hemisphere.

Negro migration to Europe from Africa began in
1442, half a century before the discovery of Amer-
ica.** In 1443 there was a shipment of 235 slaves to
Portugal.** In 1448 the first “factory” was estab-
lished in the island of Arguim for the purpose of the
new commerce. By 1461 the trade had been regular-

Fray Bartolome de Las Casas: Historia de las Indias^ Tomo
I, Cap. 24, p. 129 (Madrid, n. d.). Bryan Edwards: History of
St. Domingo (Edinburgh: J. Pillans & Sons; 1802), p. iii. J. P,
Oliveira Martins: O Brazil c as Colonias Portuguazas (Lisbon,
n. d.).

** J. Lucio de Azevedo: Bfocas de Portugal Economico (Lis-
bon: Livraria Classica Editora; 1929), p. 71.

CO <
pq U

8 i

»O 0

0 Q^o to»ocooO « ^
OOC'lt'N.OO’lOCiM

1 8 5 ^'' -ft ft

O' ^ to M ^7 i-T

S' ? 2 'fi S? 2 . 9 oo
O'^OOO'OoOt-iO'

O' N to O' I

C» M lO O' I

O' 6 to ^

? ”
■'f to

<g' 8 “ ^

-S 8888885

' 6 c>c)toc>dM
to tOMt>.t'*\OMW

'OQQtoMMCiciT}*

2 ? 9 '*^oot^MO

T^O CIOO lO'i^'MVO'O
O' <5* to to to OO oo' to to
i-i»-»oo r^OwtOto
VO O r'. coco M

S-o ? 8 ft 8

tC. d to to O' d

to Q w oo «

O' O t>» to to O
to oo O' O'

S'

8 8 v 8
6 N o

K>° 2 . 2 S

O tt to VO

to to

OUTH AMERICA

Colombia H7>Soo i. 6 o 4,234,890 46.00 405,076 450 2,205,382 24.32 9,206,283

Venezuela ^ 100,000 2.79 2,000,000 55,86 100,000 2.79 1,000,000 27.93 3,580,000

English Guiana 15,000 4.3:1 10,000 2.93 100,000 29.30 80,000 23.44 341,237

Dutch Guiana 60,000 71 10,000 5.61 -%ooo 9.55 20,000 11.23 i77>98o

French Guiana 10,000 25 00 2,000 0.50 i,oo.> 0.25 1,000 0.25 40,000

Ecuador 1,000,000 40.00 900,000 36.00 50,000 2.00 ijo,ooo 6.00 2,500,000

Peru 3,247,196 46.23 2,247,395 32-00 29,054 0.41 80,000 0.71 7,023,110

Bolivia 1,650,000 50.00 990,000 30.00 7,800 0.26 S,ooo 0.15 3,300,001

I g

o

to VO , - .

CO Ov M o

10 Ov fOl

CO w '

to to
to CO ^

M « O vO NO
o to CO o
d d « d 9

NO to o CO O

« NO Cl 00
to q CO
d d d Q

8 8S 8 8

l§§

•o Cl
<1

H O']

to cT d^ Tp cT

CO O *-• H
M SO M O CO

cd H

pq di PU <

00

d

I

to to
t^oo
“tf o
to Ci
00^ to
to nO'

M o

??
cd ^
CO Cl
NO

00

to 00

O Cl

w vO

I if'S -

P|l

g'S o-P

B

T^Iie Negro in the (Americas 15

ized and was carried on peacefully in Senegambia,
and the island of Arguim alone supplied, during the
later half of the fifteenth century, an average of seven
to eight hundred slaves per year.®'* What had hitherto
been an internal migration in Afric:. had now become
water- V'orne, first to Europe across the Mediterranean
and later, with the discovery of America, across the
Atlantic to the New World. African participation in
the new world adventur.„ began early, and in 1501 '
Nicholas Ovando, the new Governor of Espanola, is
advised to import Negroes born in Christian lands.®*
Th- first fifty Negroes from Africa were brought to
the Antilles in 151 1, and by 1517 the trade had been
so well established that a regular **asiento** was given
to the Governor of Bressa to introduce 4,000 Negroes
to America. The migration to America did not inter-
rupt the flow to Portugal itself, and in 1 552, in a pop-
ulation of 100,000, Lisbon had some 10,000 slaves,
with from sixty to seventy slave markets. There were
among them, 1,550 washerwomen, 1,000 street
cleaners, and 400 who peddled crabs, cooked rice, and
other delicacies.®*

From this time on, the movement was in full swing,

** J. P. Oliveira Martins, op. cit., p. 71.

“• Coleccion de Documentos InSditos, Rxlativos at descuiri-
mlt-nto, conquista y organizacion de las Antiguas Posesiones Espa-
nolas de Amiiica y Oceania, sacados de los Archivos del Reino, y
muy e'.pecialmente de Indies, T. XXXI (Madrid: Frias & Co.;
1888), p. 23.

** J. Lucio de Azevedo, op. cit., pp. 75-6.

i6 Slave Citizen:

and all of the European nations facing the Atlantic
were drawn into it to a greater or lesser extent, and
for longer or shorter periods. The Portuguese, the
French, the Dutch, the English, the Danes, the
Swedes, the Spaniards, and even Brandenburg partic-
ipated in it, while on the Atlantic side the American
colonies, Brazil, and Cuba at one time or another im-
ported Negroes on their own account.

> The first in the slave traffic were the Portuguese.
They had begun as early as the first quarter of the
fifteenth century tentatively to search out the African
coast, by opening the Canary and the Madeira Islands
to Portuguese settlement, and by 1434 rounded Cape
Bojador, reaching Rio d’Ouro (Rio d’Oro) in 1436,
and from then on pushed along the coast to Sierra
Leone, the Grain, Ivory, and Gold Coasts, to the
mouth of the Niger and the islands of St. Thomas and
Fernando Po, finally crossing the Equator. The Afri-
can coast for four thousand miles, from the Senegal
River in the north to the southern port of Angola be-
yond the Equator, now lay open to the white slave-
trader. He came to tap this inexhaustible source of
black labor and carry it in ever increasing numbers
across the ocean to work in his strange and unexpected
New World. A commerce grew up on a vast scale in
which human beings from Africa were bartered for
goods manufactured in Europe. These goods were of
varied and curious assortment, specialized and partic-
ularized for different parts of the African coast. On

T'he 'i^iE.GKO in the <i^mericas 17

the Leeward coast the trade goods were iron bars,
crystal beads, corals, and brass-mounted cutlasses.
Brass basins were required on the Ivory Coast. Cop-
per and iron bars were needed on the Slave Coast and
at Calabar. Arms, gunpowder, tallow, sheei cotton
and s.'rge fabrics from Europe and the East Indies,
spirits, and beads were of general use. Special care had
to be devoted to the color scheme of the goods because
the Negroes were ^^ery { :>rticular and had specialized
tastes. Ill astrations of this nice discrimination is seen
in the fact that anything blue was rejected on the
oambia, while only blue aggry beads were acceptable
on the Gold Coast. They also preferred the “perpetu-
anas” to be yellowish green.*^

The slave trade, as can be seen, was an extensive
and, by all accounts, a profitable commerce in which
for centuries European and American merchants bar-
tered goods for Negi'o slaves. The goods employed
were varied, and were largely drawn from England j
the ships, the merchants, the sailors, and the finances
came from all of the leading commercial nations that
had ships at sea. A few examples drawn mainly from
English sources will indicate the lucrative character
of the trade.

In the eleven years between 1783 and 1793 Liver-
pool put 878 ships into trade, shipped 303,737 Ne-

•’ Hon. H. A. Wyndham: The Atlantic and Slavery, “Prob-
lems of Imperial Trusteeship* series (London: Oxford University
Press; I935)> p. 66.

i8 Slave Citizen:

groes from Africa, at a value of £15,186,850.“* De-
ductions for various commissions, and other charges,
gave Liverpool a gross return of $12,294,116, or
£1,700,000 per year. After all necessary expenses in
transporting and insurance were calculated, it was
estimated that there was a gain of 30 per cent on every
slave sold. Liverpool, therefore, received a net income
in the eleven slave years of over £2,300,000 on the
303,737 Negroes, or an annual rate of over £200,000.
In effect the annual return pervaded the whole town
and contributed to the support of the greater part of
the inhabitants. Almost everyone in Liverpool had
some share in the trade. It is well known that many of
the smaller vessels that imported about a hundred
slaves were fitted out by attorneys, drapers, grocers,
tallow-chandlers, bankers, tailors, and so on. Some
had one eighth, some a sixteenth, and some a thirty-
second share in the undertaking.*®

While there were between twenty-five and forty-
two recognized houses in the trade in any one vear,
ten of these during the eleven-year period sent out
502 ships of 878 that departed from Liverpool be-

“Dicky Sam”: Liver fool and Slavery^ by a genuine “Dicky
Sam” (Liverpool: A. Bosker & Son; 1884), cites thirteen years
between 1771 and 1806 when more than a hundred ships sailed
in the slave trade every year out of Liverpool alone.

“A General Descriptive History of Liverpool,” quoted in
Elizabeth Donnan: Documents Illustrative of the History of the
Slave Trade to America (Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution
of Washington ; 1930).

The EGKO in the dAmericas 19

tween 1783 and 1793, inclusive. How important the
trade was to Liverpool may be deduced from the fact
that one half of all the shipping in that port was en-
gaged in African trade in 1 744.“ Even the most con-
servative estimate of the net income on five shipb shows
that the Lottery in 1802 p»-oduced a net profit of
£11,039, or over £23 per slave j the Enterprise
showed over £6,428, or an average per slave of over
£i6j the Fortuney in i80j„ over £1,877, or more than
£5 per sla . ej and the Louisay in the same year, a net
profit of more than £8,500."

ihe slave trade not only was profitable in itself,
but gave rise to numerous industries in Great Britain
and other countries to supply the goods needed in
barter. It employed thousands of ship carpenters,
joiners, monmongers, painters, ’^ailmakers, braziers,
boatbuilders, coopers, riggers, plumbers, glaziers,
gunsmiths, bread-makers, carters, and laborers, and
used good deal of copper for ships’ bottoms.^^ The
trade, in addition, not merely made possible the de-
velopment of the British West Indies sugar colonies,
bur supf)lied the agricultural labor for vast areas in
tropical South America and in the cotton and tobacco
region of the United States. It was considered as “the
great pillar and support of the British plantation
trade,” and Sir Josiah Child computes that every

“Dicky Sam/’ op. cit., p. 104.

Elizabeth Donnan, op. cit., p. 631, note.

“Dicky Sam,” op. cit., p. 83.

20 Slave Citizen:

Englishman who went to the West Indian colonies
employed eight or ten Negroes, and that their feed-
ing, clothing, and equipping supported four men in
England, while an Englishman emigrating to New
England would not help support even one man at
home/* And a recent study has detailed the impor-
tance of the slave trade in developing British cities
like Liverpool and laying the foundations for the
initial capital that went into the early Industrial Rev-
olution in England/* The slave trade was a great
economic enterprise, but its long-run consequences
were beyond the ken of the men involved in it.

The trade was extensive and profitable, but exceed-
ing cruel. The business developed its own special
ways, adapted to the human cargo in which it dealt,
and a kind of opaqueness to human suffering and sor-
row grew upon those engaged in it that would be hard
to believe if the record were not full beyond conjec-
ture. That such things should have been possible at
all is indicative of a capacity for callousness on the
part of the human being that our own time has made
fully evident. It is difficult to write of the slave trade
with restraint, for until the day before yesterday we
of the European tradition had a certain commitment
to morality and a certain capacity for indignation at
unwonted brutality. We of our day have become less

William Law Mathicson: British Slavery and Its Abolition
(London: Longmans, Green & Co.; 1926), p. 2.

Eric Williams: Cafitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944)'

21

^he Negro in the zJtmericas

sensitive to unkindness, more accustomed to seeing
the human body racked and tortured without being
benumbered by sheer horror. But with us, at least so
we hope, this is a temporary abberation that will soon
have passed away. The slave trade, on the otbrr hand,
lasted 'or over four centuries and in' olved, in some
measure, all of the nations of Europe and many in
this hemisphere, and counted among its victims, per-
haps as many as twenty "’llion human beings.

Little Kegro villages in the interior of Africa were
frequently attacked in the middle of the night, the
people were either killed or captured by Europeans
themselves or, more frequently, by Africans acting
on their own account or for Europeans, and the vic-
tims left alive were shackled with a collar about the
neck, men, women, and children, and driven for hun-
dreds of miles to the coast. This human caravan,
guarded by armed men, with the leaders of the expedi-
tion carried in hammoc -s or litters, would sometimes
tref a thousand miles through forest and jungle be-
fore reaching the stations where the Negroes destined
for the slave trade could be disposed of. There they
were assembled in stockades and kept against the time
when a European slaver would arrive loaded with
“African goods,” for the purpose o' barteriiig these
human beings for the iron bars, the beads, and the
cl ch brought for the purpose. Such a ship might have
loaded up in Liverpool, Nantes, Amsterdam, Bridge-
port, or any other city engaged in the commerce. The

22

Slave and Citizen:

Negroes were mainly young, ranging somewhere be-
tween sixteen and thirty years of age. When the ship
was loaded to capacity it started on the journey across
the seas to the New World. A ship usually required
some nine months for a round tripj but if the weather
was bad, or if the ship’s captain found upon reaching
the African station that he had been preceded by an-
other ship in the trade, and the factory had no avail-
able cargo, then more time might be required. Under
those conditions the ship would load up with what it
could buy, and, throwing the black creatures into the
hold, would either wait for a new batch of Negroes to
arrive or cast off and seek to fill the ship at another
supply station. It is a matter of record that some ships
spent six months trying to fill their holds with Ne-
groes, moving from port to port on the hot African
coast, with their living cargoes pining away between
decks or in the hold. When the ship had finally been
filled, it set out to vend its living wares in some ready
market on the other side of the Atlantic. But if mis-
fortune followed in the track of the ship, the prospec-
tive market might be overcrowded with new Negroes
just delivered by another ship in the trade, and the
captain, with an eye to the profit of the trip, would
trek from island to island in the West Indies until he
finally disposed of his human cargo.

On the ship itself the men and women were crowded
between decks, with little air and less ventilation ex-
cept such as filtered through narrow ventilators. There

‘the Negro in the <iAmericas 23

they were kept at least fifteen or sixteen hours a day
— on good days, that is — in darkness, without mod-
ern systems of sanitation, and without running water,
naked, and with chains about their ankles. Two men
were chained together, as a rule the right ankl : of one
to the left ankle of another. And, th”5 crowded and
bound hand and foot, they were allowed a space
barely larger than a giave — five feet six inches long,
sixteen inches broad, anc ^wo to three feet high, not
high enout^h to sit up in.**

' “During the discussion of the possible regulation of slave
vessels, Captain Perry visiiod Liverpool and examined eighteen
ve&sels, nine of which belonged to James Jones. . . • The di-
mensions of the ‘Brookes,’ one of the vessels examined, were:
‘Length of lower deck, gratings and bulkheads included, lOO
feet, breadth of beam on lower deck Inside, 25 feet 4 inche*,
depth of hold, from ceiling to ceiling, 10 feet, height between
decks, from deck to deck, 5 feet 8 inches, length of the men’s
room, on the lower deck, 4^ feet, breadth of the platforms in the
men’s ’•00m on each side, 6 1 et, length of the boys’ room, 1 3 feet

9 in' ijv,s, breadth of the boys ;oom, 25 feet, breadth of platforms
in ooys’ room, 6 feet, length of women’s room, 28 feet 6 inches,
breadth of women’s room, 23 feet 6 inches, length of platforms
in women’s room, 28 feet 6 inches, breadth of platforms in
women’s room, 6 feet, length of the gun-room, on the lower deck,

10 feet 6 inches, breadth of the gun-ioom on the lower deck, 12
feet, length of the quarter-deck, 33 feet 6 inches, breadth of the
quarter-deck, 19 feet 6 inches, length of the c.abin, 14 ieet, height
of the cabin, 6 feet 2 inches, length of the half -deck, 16 feet 6
inches, height of the half-deck, 6 feet 2 inches, length of the plat-
form^, on the half-deck, 16 feet, 6 inches, breadth of the plat-
forms on the half-deck, 6 feet, upper deck.

“Let it now be supposed that the above are the leal dimensions

24 Slave and Citizen :

The men and women were kept apart on the voy-
age, and if the weather was clear and calm, the Ne-
groes were allowed out on deck about eight in the
morning and stayed there until five in the afternoon.
But if it was stormy and rough and cold, then they
lived in the stench beneath deck — dark, steaming,
slimy, and wet.

. . . The height, sometimes, between decks, was only
eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate human beings could
not turn round, or even on their sides, the elevation being less
than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually
chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the
sense of misery and suffocation is so great, that the Negroes,
like the English in the black-hole at Calcutta, are driven to
frenzy. They had on one occasion, taken a slave vessel in the
river Bonny: the slaves were stowed in the narrow space be-

of the ship ‘Brookes,’ and further, that every man slave is to be
allowed six feet by one foot four inches for room, every woman
five feet ten by one foot, every boy five feet by one foot two, and
every girl four feet six by one foot, it will follow that a slave ves-
sel will be precisely the representation of the ship ‘Brookes,’ and
of the exact number of persons neither more nor less, that
could be stowed in the different rooms of it upon these data.
These, if counted, will be found to amount to four hundred and
fifty-one. Now, if it be considered that the ship ‘Brookes’ is of
three hundred and twenty tons, and that she is allowed to carry
by act of Parliament four hundred and fifty-four persons, it is
evident that if three more could be wedged among the number
represented in the plan, this plan would contain precisely the
number which the act directs.”

Quoted by Elizabeth Donnan, op. cit., Vol. II (“The Eight-
eenth Century,” 1931), p. 592 footnote.

TChe Negro in the <tfLmericas 25

tween decks, and chained together. They heard a horrid din
and tumult among them, and could not imagine from what
cause it proceeded. They opened the hatches and turned them
up on deck. They were manacled together, in twos and
threes. Their horror may be well conceived, when they
found a number of them in different stages of suffocation;
man) of them were foaming at the mouth, and in the last
agonies, — many were dead. The tumult they had heard,
was the frenzy of those suffocating wretches in the last stage
of fury and desperation, struggling to extricate themselves.
When they were all dragged up, nineteen were irrecoverably
dead. Many destroyed one another, in the hopes of procuring
room to breathe; men strangled those next them, and women
drove nails into each other’s brains. Many unfortunate crea-
tures, on other occasions, took the first opportunity of leaping
overboard, and getting rid, in this way, of an intolerable life.^*

When the weather cleared away and the hatches
were opened, the stench was such as to overcome those
unused to it.

Tlie stench below was so great that it was impossible to
stand moreThan a few minutes near the hatchways. Our men
who went below from curiosity, were forced up sick in a few
minutes; then all the hatches were off. What must have been
the sufferings of those poor wretches, when the hatches were
closed! I am informed that very often in these cases, the
stronger will strangle the weaker; and this was probably
the reason why so many died, or rather were found dead the
morning after the capture. None but an eye witness can form

Rev. R. Walsh: Notices of Brazil (Boston: Richardson,
Lord & Holbrook; 1831), Vol. II, p. 265.

26 Slave and Citizen:

a conception of the horrors these poor creatures must endure
in their transit across the ocean/^

But when the day was clear, they were taken out,
given water to wash their hands and face, and a little
lime juice to cleanse their mouth, and food — Indian
corn, yams, barley, and biscuit. On cold days a little
rum was passed about, and when the weather per-
mitted, they were doused in salt water to keep them
well and given a little palm oil to rub their bodies
with. And the story runs that, all going well, they
were given native musical instruments and encour-
aged to play their native songs, to sing and to dance,
with their shackles on — or perhaps these were taken
off for the occasion.

In case of rebellion and mutiny, the punishment
was swift, summary, and sure: hanging to the mast or
walking the plank. And then, when the day’s sun be-
gan to set, the innocent and surely very bewildered
Negroes, who had been forced from the interior of
Africa into a white man’s purgatory, on their way to
an unknown and unforeseeable destination, were
driven back into the dark between the decks, to wait
the dawning of another day with its unknown future.
If the weather was favorable and the ship in good
hands, and the trip was comparatively short, the men
arrived on the American coast with few losses. But if

Quoted by Lawrence F. Hill: Diflomatic Relations be-^
tween the United States and Brazil (Durham, N. C,: Duke Uni-
versity Press; 1932), p. 133.

The Negro in the Jlmericas 27

the ship had bad luck, rough weather, or a poor mas-
ter and was also the carrier of some contagious disease,
then the devil himself could have worked no greater
havoc among men. There are cases on record of the
larger part of the men dying of disease, of ships run-
ning ( Ut of water and being forced to cast men over-
board to save the rest, of mutiny in which riot and
murder ran rampant:

Some eight or ten of them were shot, with small shot, in the
hold of the brig before they could be subdued. Some thirty or
forty of them were then brought on deck and two and two
in iions, were hung up at the yard-arm, shot, their bodies let
down, and then their arms and legs chopped off to get the
irons off the corpses, and one woman was thrown into the
sea before life was extinct.^®

Finally, when the slave trade was abolished and
the carrying of Negroes from Africa to America be-
came illegal, then the ships were built for speed, the
crowding became even worse if possible, and the bar-
barities more unmitigated, for at the fear of being
captured by war sloops doing guard duty on the Afri-
can coast or along the approaches to the West Indies
or Brazil, captains were known to have cast their
Negroes into the sea to escape detection} and there
are records of as many as five hundred Negroes on
one of these ships being cast overboard for the sharks
in the wake of the ship to devour.

When the ship drew close to the shores of the
Quoted in Lawrence F. Hill, op. cit., p. 134.

28 Slave tfW Citizen:

Western World there was a systematic effort to heal
the abrasions on the Negroes’ bodies and to polish their
skin with substantial applications of oil. The arrival
in port was announced in advance by the firing of a
gun, and the crowd of purchasers rushed upon the
ship and manhandled the frightened Negroes lined
up for inspection. So great was the confusion and
fright sometimes produced that Negroes had been
known to jump overboard in sheer fright at the new
and unpredictable meaning of the sudden excitement.
The Negroes desired were marked out by the would -
be purchaser by some sign, and the frightened, naked
creatures were looked over, measured, felt, and hag-
gled about like cattle at any market, and finally sold
to some purchaser, who would then decorate his prize
with a hat and a handkerchief and march him off to be
branded. That was the process in its bare details by
which the Negro was carried from Africa to America.
Once here, he still had to go through the “seasoning,”
which always exacted a heavy mortality.*®

It is difficult to calculate the loss in lives exacted by
the slave trade. All figures are estimates, but it has
been said that about one third of the Negroes taken
from their homes died on the way to the coast and at
the embarkation stations, and that another third died
crossing the ocean and in the seasoning, so that only

Bryan Edwards: The History y Civil and Commercialy of the
British Colonies in the West Indies (Philadelphia: James Hum-
phreys; 1806), Vol. II, p. 330.

The N TGRO in the cAmericas 29

one third finally survived to become the laborers and
colonizers of the New World.

The number of Negroes transported will never be
known. The subjection of the trade to fiscal ends by
various governments led to extensive contraband,
and the more officers there were set to watch the law-
breakers, the more participants in the illegal traffic
there came to be. Nor did the abolition of the slave
trade by Great Britain and the United States, in 1 807,
end the traffic. If anything, it may have increased it.
For it is clear from the records that both Cuba and
Brazil imported greater numbers annually after that
date than before it. In fact, the transfer of Negroes
did not cease until the abolition of slavery itself, not
only in the United States, but in Cuba in 1880 and in
Brazil in 1888, and even then it continued out of
Africa to San Thome.®® Portugal, which had been the
first to enter the trade, was the last to leave it. There
is no way of giving even seeming accuracy to the num-
bers of slaves imported, but a rough estimate may be
had from citing the record for individual countries
and periods.

Between 1511 and 1513, 1,265 Negroes of both
sexes passed through the “Casa do Escravos” in
Lisbon for the account of the King, and the Jesuit
Father Garcia Simoens,®^ describing the active com-

Sir Harry Johnston, op. cit., p, 84.

Dieudonne P. Rinchon: La Traite et Vesclavage dcs Congo*
lots far les Euro f Sens (Bruxelles, 1929), p. 59.

30 Slave Citiz'sn:

merce out of Angola in 1576, estimates the annual ex-
port from there alone at 12,000. Between that year
and 1591, 52,000 were shipped to Brazil} the Brit-
ish West Indies, between 1680 and 1786, imported
2,130,000} the French West Indies had an annual
import, between 1780 and 1789, of 30,000} and
Cuba, between the years 1790 and 1820, 225,574,'*
and from 1821 to 1 847, an average annual number of
some 6,000 to 7,000," not counting those smuggled
in. The total numbers up to 1853, for Cuba alone, has
been stated to be over 644,000," and we know that
the importations continued after that.'^

Records for individual years are scattered, but sug-
gest large annual exports out of Africa. In 1769 more
than 97,000 Negroes were embarked for America,®*
while testimony before the House of Commons on
the eflFect of the abolition of the slave trade com-
mented that it would reduce the demand for slaves by
seventy or a hundred thousand, as the slave trade

Dieudonne P. Rinchon, op. cit., p. 63.

®* Bryan Edwards, quoted by Amos K. Fiske; The West In-
dies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; 1899), P- ■‘ 05 *
Alexander Humboldt, op. cit., p. 218.

®® J. P. Oliveira Martins, op. cit., p. 62.

®® Alexander Humboldt, op. cit., p. 219, footnote by trans-
lator.

®^ William R. Manning (ed.) : Diflomatic Corresfondence of
the United States. Vol. XI, Spain, 1854 (Washington, 1939),
p. 765. United States Foreign Relations, 1865, Part I, p. 665.

®® Werner Sombart; Der moderne Kafitalismus, Erster Band
(Leipzig, 1922), p. 703.

Hhe Negro in the Jlmericas 31

carried on with the East through Egypt involved only
between 1,500 and 2,000 Negroes.'®

For Brazil, the importations all through this pe-
riod were large and increasing. Between 1759 and
1803 the exports to Brazil from Angola are said to
have amounted to 642,000, or an annual average of

14.000 or 15,000.®® Some Brazilian writers have put
the numbers imported at an annual rate of 44,000 for
the seventeenth century and 55,000 for the eight-
eenth.*^ The imports into Brazil continued heavy un-
til about 1850, and have been placed as high as

50.000 per year for the ten years between 1842 and
1852.*®

All general figures are guesses, but the estimates
are significant. One author*® estimates the general
migration from the Congo to America to have been
as follows: 7,000 annually during the sixteenth cen-
tury, 15,000 during the seventeenth, and 30,000 dur-
ing the eighteenth} for the first half of the nineteenth
century he places the number at the incredible sum of

150.000 annually to 1850, and as high as 50,000 be-

Henry Brougham: An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of
the European Powers^ Vol. I (Edinburgh, 1803), p. 566.

J. P. Oliveira Martins, op. cit., p. 62.

Pandia Calogeras: Formacao Historica do Brasil (Rio de
Janeiro, 1930), p. 53.

Percy Alvin Martin: ‘‘Slavery and Abolition in Brazil,’’ in
the Hisfanic American Historical Review y Vol. XIII, No. 2 (May

>933). P- >59-

Dieudohne P. Rinchon, op. cit., p. 133.

32 Slave and Citizen:

tween 1850 and i860, and 2,000 between i860 and
1 8 8 5, a total of more than 1 3,000,000 from the Congo
from the beginning of the commerce. Exaggeration,
it seems — but, how much? Another author** sug-
gests a total of 20,000,000 exported from all Africa
for the entire period. Again an exaggeration? But by
how much? Even a conservative estimate would
hardly cut this figure in half. It really makes little
difference how much it is cut, for, to repeat, the enter-
prise lasted over four centuries and engaged the
energies of many commercially minded people in
many parts of Africa, Europe, and the Western Hem-
isphere.

Some check on these generalizations is provided by
scattered records of the number of ships engaged in
the traffic. Toward the last third of the eighteenth
century, there were forty factories on the African
coast belonging to the leading nations in Europe en-
gaged in the African trade. Of those, ten belonged
to the English, three to the French, fifteen to the
Dutch, four to the Portuguese, and four to the
Danes.** Each of these nations had ships of its own
plying the Atlantic, carrying Negroes across the
ocean. In 1600 and later,** more than a hundred
Spanish and Portuguese ships entered Loanda every

J. P. Oliveira Martins, op. cit., p. 64.
Bryan Edwards, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 255.
Dieudonnc P. Rinchon, op. cit., p. 68.

^he Negro in the cAmericas 33

year, while 192 British ships were used in the year
1771 to bring 47,146 Negroes to the West Inches.**
In 1788 the French engaged 98 ships to carry over
29,000 slaves to Santo Domingo.*® Long after the ac-
tive campaign to abolish the slave trade had been un-
der way, there were recorded, for the period between
1 833 and 1 840, anywhere from 33 to 50 ships a year
entering the ports of Cuba loaded with Negroes from
Africa.’" American-built vessels to the number of
sixty-four were sold in Rio de Janeiro alone in 1845,
and most of them were put to the slave trade; ” as
late as 1848,’* vessels sailed in the slave trade from
Bahia.

The slave trade was a profitable business and it
attracted speculators and adventurers from many
lands. A slave could be sold in Cuba for thirty times
what he had cost in Africa,” and as long as a market
could be had, there were people ready to satisfy it
even if the trade had been outlawed and the risks were
great. Joint stock companies were formed to promote
expeditions to Africa, and the flag of one nation or

Bryan Edwards, op. c’lt., p. 258.

“Dicky Sam,” op. cit.

•* Henry Brougham, op. cit., pp. 530-1.

James Bandinel: Some Account of tke Trade in Slaves from
Africa (London, 1842), p. 232.

Lawrence F. Hill, op. cit., p. 129.

William Hadfield; Brazil, the River Plate, and the Falkland
Islands (London, 1854), p. 147, note.

” William Law Mathieson, op. cit., p. 161.

34 Slave Citizen :

another was used, through fictitious sales, to evade
the law. The traders operating changed their flag to
fit changing circumstances and, after the English out-
lawed the trade, operated first under the French flag,
then under the Spanish and the Portuguese, and then
the American.

Our refusal to concede the right of search had the
efFect of playing into the hands of those who were
engaged in the traffic. The three years from 1859 to
1862 saw at least 1 70 expeditions fitted for the tradej
74 of these were believed to have sailed from New
York, 43 from other American ports, 40 from Cuba,
and the rest from Europe.^* The situation had become
so much of a scandal that President Buchanan said
in his message to Congress of May 19, i860: “It is
truly lamentable that Great Britain and the United
States should be obliged to expend such a vast amount
of money and treasure for the suppression of the Afri-
can slave trade, and this when the only portions of the
civilized world where it is tolerated and encouraged
are the Spanish islands of Cuba and Porto Rico.”

It can be seen from even these fragmentary illus-
trations — and they could be very greatly increased
— that the ships were numerous and the trade was
continuous. How many ships, on an average, sailed
annually during the four centuries? The ships were

William Law Mathieson, op. cit., p. 165.

James D. Richardson: A Comfilation of the Messages and
Pafers of the Presidents^ Vol. V, p, 595,

T’/te Negro in the (Americas 35

not large and most of them, perhaps, carried fewer
than 300 Negroes at a time. Toward the later part of
the eighteenth century, it is true, there were ships that
carried 500 or more Negroes on a single voyage, but
on the whole these were exceptions. If we put the
average at 300 Negroes per voyage — and that wovJd
probably be an exaggeration — it must have taken
many hundreds of ships in the trade to carry the total
.number of men across the Atlantic. Hundreds of ships,
thousands of sailors, and hundreds, perhaps thou-
sands, of individuals, partnerships, and companies
were engaged in bringing to the New World south of
the United States more Africans than Europeans for
the entire colonial period.

The Negro, much against his will, was to become a
participant in the building of the New World. The
migration continued for so long a time because of the
heavy mortality: “almost half of the new imported
Negroes die in the seasoning, nor does the polygamy
which they use add much to the stocking of a planta-
tion”} because in parts of the New World the Ne-
gro did not reproduce, and because men were more
readily welcomed than women for the heavy labor.
On the average, only one woman was imported for
every three men. There were plantations in Cuba, for
instance, that had as many as seventeen males to one
female, and the females became common wives, pros-

Charles Leslie: A New and Exact Account of Jamaica
(Edinburgh, 1739), p. 328.

36 Slave and Citizen:

titutes, incapable of bearing children or unwilling to
do so. The life of the Negro plantation laborer in the
West Indies is said to have averaged seven years, and
replenishment went on at the rate of one seventh or
one eighth per year.'^ If the migration had been by
families, it would perhaps have been smaller in num-
bers and of shorter duration.

Ever5^hing conspired to keep the slave trade alive
for long centuries. It would seem simple and natural
to assume that the slaves brought to this hemisphere
would multiply in such numbers as to make it un-
necessary to keep on dragging bewildered Negroes
from their distant homes in the depths of Africa across
the ocean to maintain the requisite labor supply in the
West Indian sugar islands. But local African custom,
the profits of the trader, the needs of the planter, and
t he barr enness of Negro women under slave condi-
tions, air combined to impose the need for continued
importation of Negroes to supply a labor market al-
ways being depleted. Polygamy in Africa made fewer
“salable” women available for the market} the young
females taken in slave raids were kept for wives and
the males were sold. Older women — that is, women
over twenty-two or three — were not readily accept-
able, whereas a well-proportioned man of even thirty-
five might find a ready purchaser. The plantation-
owners needed field hands for the sugar plantations,
and the work was too exacting for women. While the

Werner Sombart, op. cit., p. 70a.

The m^GKO in the lAmericas 37

tendency was for all plantations to have some women
on them, their number was almost never equal to that
of males. Even on the Cuban sugar estates, where one
would expect marriage to have been encouraged for re-
ligious reasons, there came to be a practice of keeping
male slaves only, and this was justified on the grounds
that it kept down vicious habits.^®

The readier market for males made it necessary for
the law to require shipmaster to include one third fe-
males among the Negroes they brought from Africa.
The failure of the Negro in the sugar colonies to re-
pioduce himself is illustrated by the record from
Jamaica. In 1690 that island had about 40,000 slaves,
and between that date and 1820 it imported about
800,000 more. And yet in 1820 the island had only
340,000.^® Many attempts were made, especially to-
ward the end of the slave trade, to increase the number
of women on the plantations, notably in Cuba, but
without much effect.*® It is not clear that even if the
women had been more nearly equal in number to the
men, the natural increase under the special conditions
of slavery in the British West Indies would have been
the result. One thoughtful and observant Jamaica
plantation-owner, who was eager for his slaves to in-

Alexander Humboldt, op, cit., p. 213,

Frank Wesley Pitman: “Slavery on British West Indian
Plantations in the Eighteenth Century,” in the Journal of Negro
History y Vol. XI (1926), p. 631.

Alexander Humboldt, op. cit., p. 214,

38 Slave and Citizen:

crease by natural growth, as the English slave trade
had already been abolished and the plantations in the
islands were being abandoned for lack of labor, did
what he could to favor the Negro women who had
children, and yet he complains over and over again
that all his solicitude seemed of no avail. The Negro
women did not have children.

This morning (without either fault or accident) a young,
strong healthy woman miscarried of an eight months’ child;
and this is the third time that she has met with a similar mis-
fortune. No other symptom of childbearing has been given in
the course of this year, nor are there above eight women upon
the breeding list out of more than one hundred and fifty fe-
males. Yet they are all well clothed and well fed, contented
in mind, even by their own account, over-worked at no time,
and when upon the breeding list are exempted from labor of
every kind. In spite of all this, and their being treated with
all possible care and indulgence, rewarded for bearing chil-
dren, and therefore anxious themselves to have them, how
they manage it so ill I know not, but somehow or other cer-
tainly the children do not come.®^

It is a matter of record that in twelve years before
the abolition of the slave trade a report for eleven
British West Indian islands showed a decline in the
slave population of over 60,000.®’’ And yet as soon as
slavery was abolished, the population tide turned and
the number of Negroes on the islands began to in-

M. G. Lewis: Journal of a West India ProfrietoVy 181$-^
17 (London, 1929), pp. 3 i 4 “- 5 *

82 “'phe West Indies, as They Were and Are,” in the Edift^
burgh Review (April 1859), p. 220.

T he 1 ::^ EG^o in the Americas 39

crease. On ten of these same islands the number of

Negroes increased by 54,000 in the next twelve
88

years.

Despite the cost in life, sorrow, and broken bodies,
the Negro became the effective means for the coloni-
zation of vast American regions. Cotton and tobacco
in the United States, sugar in the West Indies, cocoa
in Venezuela, sugar, mining, and coffee in Brazil, and
a thousand other kinds of enterprise everywhere else
were dependent upon the Negro. In Brazil the Negro
was so much the laborer that no one else seemed to
labor at all, and until very recently it was considered
unseemly even to carry a small parcel in the city of
Rio. As Mawe puts it, in Brazil the Negro seemed to
be the most intelligent person he met because every
occupation, skilled and unskilled, was in the Negroes’
hands. Even in Buenos Aires theirs was the hand that
built the best churches. They were the lleidhands, and
in many places the miners j they were the cooks, the
laundresses, the mammies, the concubines of the
whites, the nurses about the houses, the coachmen,
and the laborers on the wharves. But they were also
the skilled artisans who built the houses, carved the
saints in the churches, constructed the carriages, forged
the beautiful ironwork one sees in Brazil, and played
in the orchestras. The Negro, slave and free, was the
living hand that embellished the setting and provided
the art and the spice for the cultured, easy, and care-
Ibid., loc. cit.

40 Slave and Citizen:

free life that some of the New World plantation cen-
ters luxuriated in for so long a time. The very pattern
so characteristic of a large section of colonial and post-
colonial life in this hemisphere derived from their
skills, their loyalty, and their participation in the
world about them, even as slaves.

Without the Negro the texture of American life
would have been diflFerent — different in lore, family,
social organization, and politics and, equally impor-
tant, diflFerent in economy. Conceivably even the crops
that the Negro cultivated in gangs, and sometimes
under the lash, would not have been grown at all, and
large parts of tropical and semitropical American
land would have remained untilled and unnurtured.
Viewed from any side — biologically, in terms of
physical labor, socially, and in the molding of the
culture so typical of the Western World — the Ne-
gro, for those areas where he labored and lived in
large numbers, was just as important as his master,
and his contribution to the population and settlement
of this hemisphere is part of a common adventure of
folk from across the sea who have molded a new and a
diflFerent social milieu for themselves. American colo-
nization is, therefore, a joint Afro-European enter-
prise.

Looked at from the Negro’s point of view, it has
been a good adventure. For in spite of the slave trade,
in spite of the horrors of the middle passage, in spite

The '^^'EGKO in the ^Americas 4 1

of the centuries of slavery, the Negro has accommo-
dated himself to the New World in a manner not
merely creditable, but surprising. The Indian, on the
other hand, has either withered away and disap-
peared, as he did in the West Indies, or been killed
and dr'ven off, as in the plains of the United States
and -Argentina. Where he has not been extirpated
from the earth, he has remained mostly a pariah in his
native habitat. Compare the Negro in Cuba and Brazil
with the Indian in Peru, for example. The Negro in
Cuba and in Brazil is an active member of the body
politic} in Peru the Indians form an isolated body,
apart from the rest. Whereas the Negro has learned
the language of the European, the Indians, by the
millions, have remained stubborn, uncommunicative,
and isolated in their own linguistic universe. The
same has happened with many other elements of
European culture — dress, food, social customs, song,
art, and matters of faith. The Negro is a magistrate
on the city bench of New York, a member of Con-
gress} he is a senator and a member of the cabinet in
other places. He is part of the nation. He is active,
vocal, self-assertive, and a living force. He has become
culturally a European, or, if you will, an American,
a white man with a black face. The Indian, where he
has survived in large numbers, as in Guatemala, for
instance, has not become identified in this way — it
might be said in any way — with the European. For

42 Slave and Citizen:

those things he has taken over he has so amalgamated
with his own native customs that their European ori-
gin is hard to recognize.

But this adventure of the Negro in the New World
has been structured differently in the United States
than in the other parts of this hemisphere. In spite
of his adaptability, his willingness, and his compe-
tence, in spite of his complete identification with the
mores of the United States, he is excluded and denied.
A barrier has been drawn against the Negro. This
barrier has never been completely effective, but it has
served to deny to him the very things that are of
greatest value among us — equality of opportunity
for growth and development as a man among men.
The shadow of slavery is still cast ahead of us, and
we behave toward the Negro as if the imputation of
slavery had something of a slave by nature in it. The
Emancipation may have legally freed the Negro, but
it failed morally to free the white man, and by that
failure it denied to the Negro the moral status req-
uisite for effective legal freedom.

But this did not occur in the other parts of this world
we call new and free. It did not occur because the very
nature of the institution of slavery was developed in
a different moral and legal setting, and in turn shaped
the political and ethical biases that have manifestly
separated the United States from the other parts of
the New World in this respect. The separation is a
moral one. We have denied ourselves the acceptance

T!he Negro in tJie a^mericas 43

of the Negro as a man because we have denied him
the moral competence to become one, and in that have
challenged the religious, political, and scientific bases
upon which our civilization and our scheme of values
rest. This separation has a historical basis, and in turn
it has molded the varied historical outcome.

The Negro slave arriving in the Iberian Peninsvda
in the middle of the fifteenth century found a propi-
tious environment.®* The setting, legal as well as
moral, that made this easy transition possible was due
to the fact that the people of the Iberian Peninsula
were not strangers to slavery. The institution of
slavery, which had long since died out in the rest of
western Europe, had here survived for a number

Elizabeth Donnan, op. cit., Vol. I (“1441—1700,” 1930),
p, 29: ‘‘For as our people did not find tliem hardened in the belief
of the other Moors, and saw how they came in unto the law of
Christ with a good will, they made no difference between them
and their free servants, born in our own country. But those whom
they saw fitted for managing property, they set free and married
to women who were natives of the land, making with them a di-
vision of their property, as if they had been bestowed on those
who married them by the will of their own fathers, and for the
merits of their service they were bound to act in a like manner.
Yea, and some widows of good family who bought some of these
female slaves, either adopted them or left them a portion of their
estate by will, so that in the future they married right well, treat-
ing them as entirely free. Suffice it that I never saw one of these
slaves put in irons like other captives, and scarcely any one who
did not turn Christian and was not very gently treated.” Quoted
from The Chronicle of the Discover'^ and Conquest of Guinea,
by Gomes Eanries de Azurara.

44 Slave and Citizen:

of reasons, especially because of the continuing wars
with the Moors, which lasted until the very year of
the discovery of America. At the end of the fifteenth
century there were numerous slaves in Portugal and
Spain, and especially in Andalusia, among them not
only Negroes, but Moors, Jews, and apparently Span-
iards as well.®' For we have records of white slaves
sent to America by special permission of the crown.
We know that Rodrigo Contreras, the Governor of
Nicaragua, was allowed by special cedula, of July 15,
1534, to import two white slaves} Fernando Pizarro
in 1535 was permitted four white slaves} and there
were a number of similar records.®* There were large
numbers of Negro slaves in both Portugal and Spain.
By the middle of the sixteenth century Algarves was
almost entirely populated by Negroes, and they out-
numbered the whites in Lisbon.®’^ In Spain, in 1474,
Ferdinand and Isabella empowered the Negro Juan
de Valladolid, known as the “Negro Count,” as the
“mayoral of the Negroes,” to settle their quarrels and
to enforce the King’s justice among them.®® But long
after this date there were still Moorish and Jewish
slaves in Spain. In 1500-1, Jewish slaves held by
Spaniards were required to be baptized or to be sent

Dieudonne P. Rinchon, op. cit., p. 44.

George Scelle: La Traite negriere (Paris: L. Lerose k L.
Tenin; 1906), Vol. I, pp. 219-20.

H. Morse Stephens: Portugal (New York, 1891), p. 182.

Arthur Helps: The Sfanish Conquest in America (London,
i8ss), Vol. I, p. 32.

TAe Negro m the <tJlinericas 45

out of the country within two months. Slaves were
to be freed by baptism if their masters were Moors or
Jews.®* As late as 1616 the law speaks of baptized
Moorish slaves.®*

But the mere survival of slavery in itself is perhaps
less important than the persistence of a long tradition
of slave law that had come down through the Justinian
Code. The great codification of Spanish traditional
law, which in itself summarizes the Mediterranean
legal mores of many centuries, was elaborated by
Alfonso the Wise between the years 1263 1265.

In this code there is inherent belief in the equality of
men under the law of nature, and slavery therefore is
something against both nature and reason.®* But the
doctrine of the equality of human nature had long
before been asserted by Cicero. According to him,
there is “no resemblance in nature so great as that be-
tween man and man, there is no equality so com-

Henry Charles Lea: A History of the Sfanish Inquisition
(New York, 1906), Vol. I, pp. 142—5.

Ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 405.

^^Servidumbre es fostura et establescimiento qui jicieron
antiguamente las gentesy for la qual los homeSy que eran natural^
miente libresy se facian siervos et se sometian a sehorio de otri
contra razon de natura?^ Ley I, titulo xxi, partida 4, Las Sieste
Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso el Sabioy Cortejadas con Variod
Codices Antiguos for la Real Academia de la Historiay y Glosadas
for el Lie, Gregorio LofeZy del Consejo Real de Insias de S, M,
Nueva Ediciony frecedida del Elogio del Rey Don Alfonso for
D, y. de Vargas y PoncCy y Enriquecida con su Testamento Po'^
litico (s vols., Paris, 1847).

46 Slave Citizen:

plete.” Reason is common to all men, and all are
equal in their capacity for learning. Under guidance,
every race of men is capable of attaining virtue. This
doctrine of the equality of man is applied to the idea
of slavery by Seneca with great vigor. Virtue is im-
mune to misfortune. “A slave can be just, brave, mag-
nanimous.” Slavery is the result of misfortune, and
hateful to all men. But, after all, slavery affects only
the body, which may belong to the master; the mind
“cannot be given into slavery.” The soul of the slave
remains free.

The slave is a man and suffers from the same pains,
and delights in the same joys, that all men do. The
slave, as a human being, is derived from the same
source, and will finally come to the same end, as other
men. The distinction between slavery and freedom is
a product of accident and misfortune, and the free
man might have been a slave. These theories of the
equality of man were in the background when the
New Testament and the Christian fathers came upon
the scene and proclaimed that all men are equal in the
sight of God. The conception of the identity of human
nature over all the world is like that in Cicero and
Seneca.** And when St. Paul touches upon the subject

R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle: A History of Medieval
Political Theory in the West (Edinburgh and London: W. Black-
wood and Sons; 1903), Vol. I, p. 8.

Ibid., p. 21.

Ibid., p. 84.

T^he Negro in the ^Americas 47

of slavery, it is to the effect that in the sight of God
“there is neither bond nor free.” That is, in their
brotherhood as children of one God, the bondsman
and the master are equal in his sight. This does not
involve a repudiation of slavery, but rather an asser-
tion t^sat spiritually they are equal. And when St.
Paul sends Onesimus, apparently an escaped slave,
back to his master, it is with the admonition that he
should be received as “a brother beloved.” “* There is
no suggestion of freedom for the returning slave, but
rather that he should be received “as myself.”
Slav^ery is not formally opposed: “Let every man
abide in the same calling wherein he was called” j **
but there is also a favoring of freedom: “Art thou
called being a bond servant? Care not for itj but if
thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” ®®

St. Paul further develops the theme of the equality
of master and slave: “Servants, be obedient to them
that are your masters according to the flesh with fear
and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto
Christ. . . . And, ye masters, do the same things
unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that your
Master also is in heaven j neither is there respect of
persons with him.” There is perhaps no great dis-

Galatians iii, 28.

Philemon, 16.

Ibid., 17,

Corinthians viii, 20.

Ibid, viii, 21,

Ephesians vi, 5, 9.

48 Slave and Citizen:

tinction to be drawn between St. Paul’s attitude to-
ward the equality of man and that of Cicero and Sen-
eca, but clearly the doctrine that slavery merely afPects
the outer man and that spiritually master and slave
are equal Is here reaffirmed, and was to “dominate
the thought and practical tendencies of the church.”
These underlying doctrines become part of the theory
of the later church fathers, and take the form of say-
ing that God made not slaves and free men, but all
men free.

This belief that equality among men is natural and
reasonable is, therefore, both pagan and Christian,
and stems from the Stoics and from the Christian
fathers. The conception that man is free and equal,
especially equal in the sight of God, made slavery as
such a mundane and somewhat immaterial matter.
The master had, in fact, no greater moral status than
the slave, and spiritually the slave might be a better
man than his master, has Siete Partidas was framed
within this Christian doctrine, and the slave had a
body of law, protective of him as a human being, which
was already there when the Negro arrived and had
been elaborated long before he came upon the scene.
And when he did come, the Spaniard may not have
known him as a Negro, but the Spanish law and mores
knew him as a slave and made him the beneficiary of
the ancient legal heritage. This law pr®vided, among
other matters, for the following:

R.W.and A. J. Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 88-9.

T!he Negro in the z/tmericas 49

The slave might marry a free person if jthe slave
status was known to the other party. Slaves could
marry against the will of their master if they con-
tinued serving him as before. Once married, they
could not be sold apart, except under conditions per-
mitting them to live as man and wife. If the slave
married a free person with the knowledge of his mas-
ter, and the master did not announce the fact of the
existing slave status, thei) the slave by that mere fact
became free.^“‘‘ If married slaves owned by separate
masters could not live together because of distance, the
church should persuade one or the other to sell his
slave. If neither of the masters could be persuaded,
the church was to buy one of them so that the married
slaves could live together.^®* The children followed
the status of their mother, and the child of a free
mother remained free even if she later became a
slave.^®* In spite of his full powers over his slave, the
master might neither kill nor injure him unless au-
thorized by the judge, nor abuse him against reason
or nature, nor starve him to death. But if the master
did any of these things, the slave could complain to
the judge, and if the complaint were verified, the
judge must sell him, giving the price to the owner,
and the slave might never be returned to the original
master.*®* Any Jewish or Moorish slave became free

Las SieU Partidasy Ley I, tit. v, part. 4.

Ibid., Ley II. Ibid., Ley III.

Ibid., Ley II, tit. xxi, part. 4.

50 Slave Citizen:

upon turning Christian, and even if the master him-
self later became a Christian, he recovered no rights
over his former slave/”*

L.as Siete Partidas goes into considerable detail in
defining the conditions under which manumission
could occur. A master might manumit his slave in the
church or outside of it, before a judge or other person,
by testament or by letter j but he must do this by him-
self, in person.^*' If one of the owners of a slave wished
to free him, then the other must accept a just price
fixed by the local judge.^”® A slave became free against
his master’s will by denouncing a forced rape against
a virgin, by denouncing a maker of false money, by
discovering disloyalty against the King, by denounc-
ing the murderer of his master.’”® The slave could be-
come free if he became a cleric with the consent of his
master, or in certain cases without his consent, provid-
ing another slave in his place. And if the former slave
became a bishop, he had to put up two slaves, each
valued at the price that he himself was worth, while
still a slave.’’” A Christian slave living among the
Moors might return to live among the Christians as
a free man.’”

The slave could appeal to the courts ( i ) if he had

Las Siete Partidas, Ley VIII.

Ibid., Ley VI, tit. xxii, part. 4.

Ibid., Ley II.

Ibid., Ley IV.

Ibid., Ley IV.

Ibid., Ley VII.

T^he Negro in the cAmericas 51

been freed by will and testament, and the document
maliciously hidden} under these circumstances he
could appeal against anyone holding him} (2) if the
slave had money from another and entrusted it to
someone for the purpose of being bought from his
master and given his liberty, and if then this person
refused to carry out the trust, by refusing either to
buy him or to free him if he had bought him} and (3)
if he had been bought with the understanding that he
would be freed on the receipt of the purchase price
from the slave, and refused either to accept the money
or to release him after accepting it.^^’* He could appeal
to the courts for defense of the property of his master
in his master’s absence, and the King’s slaves could
appeal to the courts in defense of the King’s property,
or of their own persons — a special privilege per-
mitted the King’s slaves in honor of their master.”*
A man considering himself free, but demanded for a
slave, might have a representative to defend him} a
man held a slave, but claiming to be free, might argue
his own case, but not have a representative, and he
must be permitted to argue and reason his case} the
slave’s relatives might plead for him, and even a
stranger could do so, for “all the laws of the world aid
toward freedom.” Slaves could be witnesses, even
against their masters, in accusations for treason against

Ibid., Ley VII, tit. ii, part. 3,

Ibid., Ley IX, tit. ii, part. 3.

Ibid., Ley IV, tit. v, part. 3.

52 Slave diW Citizen:

the King; in cases of murder of either master or mis-
tress by either spouse; or in cases against the mistress
for adultery; when one of the two owners of a slave
was accused of killing the other; or in case of suspicion
that the prospective heirs have killed the master of
another slave/^* A slave who became the heir of his
master, in part or in totality, automatically became
free/^® If a father appointed a slave as the guardian
of his children, the slave by that fact became free;
and if he was the slave of more than one person and
became an heir of one of his masters, the other must
accept a price in reason for that part of the slave which
belonged to him.^^® He who killed his slave inten-
tionally must suffer the penalty for homicide, and if
the slave died as a result of punishment without in-
tention to kill, then the master must suffer five years*
exile,***

Spanish law, custom, and tradition were trans-
ferred to America and came to govern the position
of the Negro slave. It is interesting to note that a
large body of new law was developed for the treat-
ment of the Indians in America, whereas the Negro’s
position was covered by isolated cedulas dealing with
special problems. It was not until 1789 that a formal

Las Siete Partidas, Ley XIII, tit. xvi, part. 3.

Ibid., Ley XXI, tit. v, part. 6.

Ibid., Ley VII, tit. xvi, part. 6.

Ibid., Ley XXIII, tit. iii, part. 6.

Ibid., Ley IX, tit. viii, part. 7.

The Negro in the aAmericas 53

code dealing with the Negro slave was promul-
gated/*® But this new code, as recognized by the pre-
amble itself, is merely a summary of the ancient and
traditional law. Saco says of it that it merely re-
peats in amplified form “our ancient laws,” and the
practice recommended is “very usual in our domin-
ions of the Indies.”

This body of law, containing the legal tradition of
the Spanish people and also influenced by the Catho-
lic doctrine of the equality of all men in the sight of
God, was biased in favor of freedom and opened the
gaies to manumission when slavery was transferred
to the New World. The law in Spanish and Portu-
guese America facilitated manumission, the tax-gath-
erer did not oppose it,*** and the church ranked it
among the works singularly agreeable to God. A hun-
dred social devices narrowed the gap between bond-
age and liberty, encouraged the master to release his

Real Cedula de Su Magestad sohre la Educacion^ Trato^ y
Ocufaciones de los Esclavosy en Todos sus Dominios de IndiaSy e
Islas FilipnaSy Baxo las Reglas que Se Expesan, This law has
been reprinted several times, most recently in an article by Raul
Carranca y Trujillo in Revista de Historia de Americay Numero
3 (Mexico, September 1938), pp. 50-9.

Jose Antonio Saco, Historia de la Esclavitud de la Roza
Africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en es fecial en los Paises Americo-
Hisfanos (Havana: Cultural, s. a.; 1938), Tomo III, pp, 265-6.

122 Cuban market freedom was the only commodity

which could be bought untaxed j every negro against whom no
one had proved a claim of servitude was deemed free, . .
William Law Mathieson, op. cit., pp. 37-8.

54 Slave Citizen:

slave, and the bondsman to achieve freedom on his
own account. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century, slaves in Brazil, by reimbursing the original
purchase price, could compel their masters to free
them.”’ In Cuba and in Mexico the price might be
fixed at the request of the Negro, and the slave was
freed even if he cost “triple of the sum.” The right
to have his price declared aided the Negro in seeking
a new master, and the owner was required to transfer
him to another.^*®

The law further permitted the slave to free him-
self by installments, and this became a widely spread
custom, especially in Cuba.”® A slave worth six hun-
dred dollars could buy himself out in twenty-four in-
stallments of twenty-five dollars each, and with every
payment he acquired one twenty-fourth of his own
freedom. Thus, when he had paid fifty dollars, he
owned one twelfth of himself.^’' On delivering his
first installment, he could mo^e from his master’s

Sir Harry Johnston, op. cit., p. 89, D. P. Kidder and J. C.
Fletcher: Brazil and the Brazilians (New York: Childs and Peter-
son; 1857), p. 133.

Alexander Humboldt: Political Essay on the Kingdom of
New Sfainy translated by John Black (New York: 1 . Riley; 181 1),
Vol. I, p. 1 8 1.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.: To Cuba and Back (Boston:
Tichnor and Fields; 1859), p. 249.

Fernando Ortiz: Los Negros Esclavos (Havana, I9i6)>

P-313-

Alexander Humboldt: The Island of Cuba^ op. cit., p. 21 1.

T^he Negro tJie ^Americas 55

house,*** and thereafter pay interest on the remaining
sum, thus acquiring a position not materially different
in effect from that of a man in debt who had specific
monetary obligations. There seem to have been many
instances of slaves paying out all of the installments
due on their purchase price except the last fifty or one
hundred dollars, and on these paying one half a real
per day for every fifty pesos. The advantage in this
arrangement apparently lay in the fact that a Negro,
thus partially a slave, could escape the payment of
taxes on his property and be free from military serv-

• ' 29

ICC.

In effect, slavery under both law and custom had,
for all practical purposes, become a contractual ar-
rangement between vhe master and his bondsman.
There may have been no written contract between
the two parties, but the state behaved, in effect, as if
such a contract did exist, and used its powers to en-
force it. This presumed contract was of a strictly
limited liability on the part of the slave, and the
state, by employing the officially provided protector
of slaves, could and did define the financial obliga-
tion of the slave to his master in each specific instance
as it arose. Slavery had thus from a very early date,
at least in so far as the practice was concerned, moved
from a “status,” or “caste,” “by law of nature,” or
because of “innate inferiority,” or because of the “just

^28 Fernando Ortiz, op. cit., p. 317.

Ibid., p. 315.

Slave and Citizen:

56

judgment and provision of holy script,” to become a
mere matter of an, available sum of money for re-
demption. Slavery had become a matter of financial
competence on the part of the slave, and by that fact
lost a great part of the degrading imputation that at-
tached to slavery where it was looked upon as evi-
dence of moral or biological inferiority. Slavery could
be wiped out by a fixed purchase price, and therefore
the taint of slavery proved neither very deep nor in-
delible.

In addition to making freedom something obtain-
able for money, which the slave had the right to ac-
quire and possess, the state made manumission possi-
ble for a number of other reasons. A Negro could be
freed if unduly punished by his master.^*® He was at
liberty to marry a free non-slave (and the master
could not legally interfere), and as imder the law
the children followed the mother, a slave’s children
born of a free mother were also free.^®’ Slaves in Bra-
zil who joined the army to fight in the Paraguayan
war were freed by decree on November 6, 1866, and
some twenty thousand Negroes were thus liberated.®*®

In the wars of independence many thousands of
slaves in Venezuela and Colombia were freed by
Bolivar and enlisted in the army of liberation. In Ar-

Alexander Humboldt: Political Essay y op. cit., p. i8l.

Henry Koster: Travels in Brazil (Philadelphia: M. Carey
& Son; 1817), Vol. II, p. 202. Fernando Ortiz, op. cit., p. 337.

^82 Percy Alvin Martin, op. cit., p. 1 74,

'The Negro in the zJtmericas 57

gentina perhaps as many as a third of San Martin’s
host that crossed the Andes was composed of freed
Negroes. And, finally, as early as 1733, by a special
cedula repeated twice later, slaves escaping to Cuba
from other West Indian islands because they wished
to embrace the Catholic religion could be neither re-
turned to their masters, nor sold, nor given in slavery
to any other person.^®*

But significant and varied as were these provisions
of the law in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies,
they were less important in the long run than the so-
cial arrangements and expectancies that prevailed. It
was permissible for a slave child in Brazil to be freed
at the baptismal font by an offer of twenty milreis,®**
and in Cuba for twenty-five dollars.’®* A female slave
could seek a godfather for her baby in some respect-
able person, hoping that the moral obligation im-
posed upon the godfather would lead to freeing the
child. It was both a meritorious and a pious deed to
accept such a responsibility and to fulfill its implicit
commitments, and it bestowed distinction upon him
who accepted them.’®* In the mining regions of Minas
Geraes a slave who found a seventeen and a half carat
diamond was crowned with a floral wreath, dressed

*** Fernando Ortiz, op. cit., p. 351.

Robert Southey: History of Brazil (London, 1819), Part
III, p. 784.

William Law Mathieson, op. cit., p. 37.

Henry Koster, op. cit., p. 195.

58 Slave tfW Citizen:

in a white suit, carried on the shoulders of fellow
slaves to the presence of his master, and freed and
allowed to work for himself.^” A parent having ten
children could claim freedom, whether male or
female.

The freeing of one’s slaves was an honorific tradi-
tion, and men fulfilled it on numerous occasions. Fa-
vorite wet nurses were often freed; slaves were manu-
mitted on happy occasions in the family — a birth of
a first son, or the marriage of one of the master’s chil-
dren. In fact, the excuses and the occasions were nu-
merous — the passing of an examination in school
by the young master, a family festival, a national holi-
day, and, of course, by will upon the death of the mas-
ter.”* A cataloguing of the occasions for manumission
in such a country as Brazil might almost lead to
wonder at the persistence of slavery; but as I have
pointed out above, the importations of slaves were
large and continuous in Brazil all through the colo-
nial period and late into the nineteenth centurj.

Opportunities for escape from slavery were fur-
ther facilitated by the system of labor that prevailed
in many places, particularly in cities. Slaves were often
encouraged to hire themselves out and bring their
masters a fixed part of their wages, keeping the rest.
Skilled artisans, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths,

John Mawe: Travels in the Interior of Brazil (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown j 1812), p. 318.

Percy Alvin Martin, op, cit., p, 1 70,

he ^EGKO in the iMmericas 59

wheelwrights, tailors, and musicians were special
gainers from the arrangement/”* But even ordinary
laborers were allowed to organize themselves in
gangs, gente de Ganho, as they were called. Preceded
by a leader, who would guide them in a rhythmic
chant, they would offer their services as carriers on
the wharves of the city or to do any heavy work that
came to hand. The description of these chanting gangs
of Negro slaves in the city of Rio, carrying bags of
coffee on their heads, their sweating bodies stripped
to th.e waist, marching in rhythm to their own song,
is like nothing else in social history:

. . . the rapid lope and monotonous grunt of the coffee-
bag carriers, their naked bodies reeking with oily sweat; the
jingling and drumming of the tin rattles or gourds borne
by the leaders of gangs, transporting on their heads all man-
ner of articles — chairs, tables, sofas, and bedsteads, the en-
tire furniture of a household; the dull recitative, followed by
the loud chorus, with which they move along ; the laborious
cry of others, tugging and hauling and pushing over the
rough pavements heavily laden trucks and carts, an overload
for an equal number of mules or horses, all crowd on the
observation. Others, both male and female, more favored in
their occupation, are seen as peddlers, carrying in the same
manner, trunks and boxes of tin, containing various mer-
chandise; glass cases filled with fancy articles and jewelry;
tra3rs with cakes and confectionery; and baskets with fruit,
flowers and birds. And yet again others of the same color
and race, more fortunate still, in being free — the street-

Fernando Ortiz, op. cit., p. 318.

6o Slave Citizen:

vendor, the mechanic, the tradesman, the soldier; the mer-
chant and the priest in his frock.^“

But the slave in this procession had his wages for
himself after paying the master his share. Individual
persons in Rio, otherwise poor, would make their liv-
ing from the owning of one or more of these male
or female slaves, whom they permitted to hire them-
selves out.“^ Women often hired themselves out as wet
nurses, and both male and female slaves peddled a
thousand wares through the streets.

Slaves of both sexes cry wares through every street. Vege-
tables, flowers, fruits, edible roots, fowls, eggs, and every ru-
ral product, cakes, pies, rusks, doces, confectionery, “heavenly
bacon,” etc., pass your windows continually. Your cook wants
a skillet, and, hark! the signal of a pedestrian copper-smith
is heard; his bell is a stew-pan, and the clapper a hammer.
A water-pot is shattered; in half an hour a meringue-
merchant approaches. You wish to replenish your table-
furniture with fresh sets of knives, new-fashioned tumblers,
decanters, and plates, and, peradventure, a cruet, with a few
articles of silver. Well, you need not want them long. If
cases of cutlery, of glassware, china, and silver have not al-
ready passed the door, they will appear anon. So of every
article of female apparel, from silk dress or shawl to a hand-
kerchief and a paper of pins. Shoes, bonnets, ready trimmed,
fancy jewelry, toy-books for children, novels for young folks,
and works of devotion for the devout; “Art of Dancing” for
the awkward; “School of Good Dress” for the young;

C. S. Stewart: Brazil and, La Plata: the Personal Record of
a Cruise (New York: G. P. Putnam & Co.; 1856), p.

Rev. R, Walsh: Notices of Brazil, Vol. 11 , p. 20.

Negro m the <^mericas 6i

“Manual of Politeness” for boors; “Young Ladies’ Oracle”;
“Language of Flowers” ; “Holy Reliquaries” ; “Miracles of
Saints,” and “A Sermon in Honor of Bacchus” — these
things, and a thousand others, are hawked about daily/*®

With all its cruelty, abuse, hardship, and inhuman-
ity, the atmosphere in Brazil and in the Spanish-
American countries made for manumission. Even in
the rural regions individuals were allowed to sell the
products from their ow:i plots, given them to work
for themselves, and to save their money toward the
day of freedom. In Cuba, one writer notes, the raising
of pigs by slaves provided a ready source of the sums
accumulated for such a purpose.^*® It should be fur-
ther noticed that, in addition to their Sundays, the
Negroes in Brazil had many holidays, amounting all
together to eighty-four days a year, which they could
use for their own purposes, and for garnering such
funds as their immediate skill and opportunities made
possible. The purchase of one’s freedom was so ac-
cepted a tradition among the Negroes that many a
Negro bought the freedom of his wife and children
while he himself continued laboring as a slave, and
among the freed Negroes societies were organized
for pooling resources and collecting funds for the
freeing of their brethren still in bondage.^**

Thomas Ewbank, op. cit., pp. 92—3.

Rev. Abiel Abbot: Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba
(Boston: Bowles and Dearbornj 1829), p. 97.

Arthur Ramos: The Negro in Brazil^ translated from the
Portuguese by Richard Pattee (Washington, D.C., 1939), p. 70*

62 Slave Citizen:

These many provisions favoring manumission were
strongly influenced by the church. Without interfer-
ing with the institution of slavery where the domestic
law accepted it, the church early condemned the slave
trade and prohibited Catholics from taking part in it.
The prohibition was not effective, though it in some
measure may have influenced the Spaniards to a
rather limited participation in the trade as such. The
slave trade had been condemned by Pius II on Octo-
ber 7, 1462, by Paul III on May 29, 1537, by Urban
VIII on April 2, 1 639, by Benedict XIV on December
20, 1741, and finally by Gregory XVI on December
3, 1839. The grounds of the condemnation were that
innocent and free persons were illegally and by force
captured and sold into slavery, that rapine, cruelty,
and war were stimulated in the search for human be-
ings to be sold at a profit.”' The Franciscan Father
Thomas Mercado had condemned the slave trade in
the strongest terms in the year 1587, on the grounds
that it fostered two thousand falsehoods, a thousand
robberies, and a thousand deceptions. But the church
did not interfere with the customary institution where
it derived from known practices in a given commu-
nity, such as born slaves, slaves taken in a just war,
or those who had sold themselves or had been con-
demned by a legitimate court.

The presumption against the slave trade was that
it forced people into slavery outside the law and

1** Jose Antonio Saco, op. cit., Tomo HI, pp. 64-6.

T!he Negro in the <iAmericas 63

against their will. More important in the long run
than the condemnation of the slave trade proved the
church’s insistence that slave and master were equal
in the sight of God. Whatever the formal relations
between slave and master, they niust both recognize
their • elationship to each other as moral human be-
ings and as brothers in Christ. The master had an ob-
ligation to protect the spiritual integrity of the slave,
to teach him the Christian religion, to help him
achieve the privileges of the sacraments, to guide him
into living a good life, and to protect him from mortal
sin.. The slave had a right to become a Christian, to be
baptized, and to be considered a member of the Chris-
tian community. Baptism was considered his entrance
into the community, and until he was sufficiently in-
structed to be able to receive it , he was looked upon
as out of the community and as something less than
human.’^®

From the very beginning the Catholic churches in
America insisted that masters bring their slaves to
church to learn the doctrine and participate in the
communion. The assembled bishops in Mexico in the
year 1555 urged all Spaniards to send the Indians,
and especially the Negroes, to church} similarly in
Cuba in 1680.“®

Henry Koster, op. cit., p. 199.

Concilios Provincialesy Primero y Segundo, Mexico, En los
Anos de 1555 y 15^5 (Mexico, 1769), Concilio primero. Cap.
Ill, p. 44.

Jose Antonio Saco, op. cit., Tomo I, pp. 165—7.

64 Slave and Citizen:

In fact, Negroes were baptized in Angola before
leaving for their Atlantic journey to Brazil. Upon
arrival they were instructed in the doctrine, and as
evidence of their baptism carried about their necks
a mark of the royal crown. As a Catholic the slave was
married in the church, and the banns were regularly
published.^®* It gave the slave’s family a moral and
religious character unknown in other American slave
systems. It became part of the ordinary routine on the
slave plantations for the master and slaves to attend
church on Sundays, and regularly before retiring at
night the slaves gathered before the master’s house to
receive his blessings.’®’ If married by the church, they
could not be separated by the master. Religious fra-
ternities sprang up among the slaves. These were
often influential and honorific institutions, with regu-
larly elected officers, and funds for the celebration of
religious holidays subscribed to by the slaves out of
their own meager savings. In Brazil the slaves
adopted the Lady of the Rosary as their own special
patroness, sometimes painting her black. In a measure
these religious fraternities emulated those of the
whites, if they did not compete with them, and the
slaves found a source of pride in becoming members.

Henry Koster, op. cit., p. 198.

Ibid., p. 202.

Alfred R. Wallace: A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon
and Rio Negro (London: Reeve k Co.; 1853), p. 92.

T^he Negro in the <t^mericas 65

and honor in serving one of these religious fraterni-
ties as an official.’'*

If the Latin-American environment was favorable
to freedom, the British and American were hostile.’**
Legal obstacles were placed in the way of manumis-
sion, and it was discouraged in evciy other manner.
The presumption was in favor of slavery.’*^ A Negro
who could not prove th;!t he was free was presumed to
be a runaway slave anc was advertised as such; if no
claimant appeared, he was sold at public auction for
the public benefit.’" In Demerara no slave could be
manumitted without the consent of the Governor and
Council. In most of the British colonies heavy taxes

Robert Southey, op. clt., p. 784,

163 There were, briefly speakinti:, three slave systems in the
Western Hemisphere. The British, American, Dutch, and Danish
were at one extreme, and the Spanish and Portuguese at the other.
In between these two fell the French. The first of these groups
is characterized by the fac t that they had no effective slave tradi-
tion, no slave law, and thal their religious institutions were little
concerned about the Negro. At the other extreme there were both
a slave law and a belief that the spiritual personality of the slave
transcended his slave status. In between them the French suffered
from the lack of a slave tradition and slave law, but did have the
same religious principles as the Spaniards and Portuguese. If one
were forced to arrange these systems of slavery in order of severity,
the Dutch would seem to stand as the hardest, the Portuguese as
the mildest, and the French, in between, as having elements of
both.

William Law Mathieson, op. cit., pp, 38-40.

Ibid., pp. 38-40.

66

Slave and Citizen:

had been imposed on manumission, and as late as
1802 a law was passed in the Northern Leeward Is-
lands requiring the owner who would register his
slave for manumission to pay five hundred pounds
into the public treasury,^'* and this sum had to be pro-
vided in his will if it made provision for the liberation
of the slave. The slave could not be freed without
the master’s consent, even if the full price of the slave
was offered. In the fear of an increase of freemen,
Barbados, in 1801, passed a law taxing the manumis-
sion of a female slave much more heavily than a male.
St. Christopher, which taxed manumission for the
first time in 1 802, declared it to be a “great inconven-
ience . . . that [the number of] free Negroes and
. . . free persons of color was augmented” by releas-
ing slaves from bondage, and provided that a slave
who had been released by his master, but not formally
enfranchised, should be “publicly sold at vendue.”

In the southern part of the United States the posi-
tion of the slave was closely similar to that in the
British West Indies. What is important to note is the
tendency to identify the Negro with the slave. The
mere fact of being a Negro was presumptive of a
slave status. South Carolina in 1740 (similarly
Georgia and Mississippi) provided that “all negroes,
Indians (those now free excepted) . . . mulattoes,
or mestizos, who are or shall hereafter be in the prov-

Sir Harry Johnston, op. cit,, p. 231.

William Law Mathieson, op. cit., pp. 38—40*

Hhe Negro in the ^Americas 67

ince, and all their issue and offspring, born or to be
born, shall be and they are hereby declared to be and
remain forever hereafter absolute slaves and shall
follow the condition of the mother.” Equally strik-
ing is an early law of Marylana, dating from 1663:
“Ail negroes or other sla^'es with:.-, the province, all
negroes to be hereafter imported, shall serve durante
vita”; and their children were to follow the condition
of the father. Signific^irtly the same law said: “That
whatsoever freeborn women (English) shall inter-
marry with any slave . . . shall serve the master of
such slave during the life of her husband j all the issue
of such freeborn women, so married, shall be slave as
their fathers were.” A free Negro in South Caro-
lina (1740) harboring a runaway slave, or charged
“with any criminal matter,” upon inability to pay the
fine and court charges was to be sold “at public auc-
tion.” The same state provided that an emanci-
pated Negro set free otherwise than according to the
act of 1800 could be seized and kept as a slave by
“any person whatsoever.”

The Negro was a slave, and the pressure seemed,
in a number of states, anyway, to keep him one, or to
reduce him to slavery if free. In Virginia an emanci-

George M. Stroud: A Sketch of the Lafc^ Relating to Slav*
cry in the Several States of the United States of America (2nd
edition, Philadelphia: H. Longstreth} 1856), pp. 60-1.

Ibid., p. 14.

Ibid., p. 24.

68 Slave Citizen ;

pated slave who had not left the state in the twelve
months after being rhanumitted could be sold by the
overseer of the poor “for the benefit of the Literary
Fund”} similarly in North Carolina. In Florida
a free mulatto or Negro could be made a slave for the
smallest debt executed against him. In Mississippi
any Negro or mulatto not being able to show himself
a free man could be sold by the court as a slave. In
Maryland (1717) any free Negro or mulatto, man or
woman, intermarrying with a white person became
a slave for life.^®^ Because the Negroes were brought
in as slaves, the black color raised the presumption of
slavery, which was generally extended to mulattoes,
and in many states this presumption was enunciated
by statute, putting on them the onus of proving that
they were free. In Virginia and Kentucky one-fourth
Negro blood constituted a presumption of slavery,
and all children born of slave mothers were slaves.^®*
Under the British West Indian and United States
laws the Negro slave could not hope for self-redemp-
tion by purchase, and as slavery was assumed to be
perpetual, there was only one route to freedom —
manumission. But this route, if not entirely blocked,
was made difficult by numerous impediments. The

Quoted in George M. Stroud, op. cit., p. 27.

*** Ibid., pp. 27—30.

168 Xhomas R. R. Cobb: An Inquiry into the Law of Negro
Slavery in the United States of America (Philadelphia and Savan-
nah, 1858), p. 238.

’The Negro in the aAmericas 69

bias in favor of keeping the Negro in servitude con-
trasts with the other slave systems here under consid-
eration, describes the explicit and the implicit test of
the two systems, and foreshadows their ultimate out-
come. For the attitude toward manumission is the
crucial element in slavery} it implies the judgment of
the moral status of the slave, and foreshadow? his role
in case of freedom.

Just as the favoring of manumission is perhaps the
most characteristic and significant feature of the Latin-
An .erican slave system, so opposition to manumisbion
and denial of opportunities for it are the primary
aspect of slavery in the British West Indies and in the
United States. The frequency and ease of manumis-
sion, more than any other factor, influence the charac-
ter and ultimate outcome of the two slave systems in
this hemisphere. For the ease of manumission be-
speaks, even if only implicitly, a friendly attitude to-
ward the person whose freedom is thus made possible
and encouraged, just as the systematic obstruction of
manumission implies a complete, if unconscious, atti-
tude of hostility to those whose freedom is opposed or
denied. And these contrasting attitudes toward manu-
mission work themselves out in a hundred small, per-
haps unnoticed, but significant details in the treatment
of the Negro, both as a slave and when freed. Either
policy reveals the bent of the system, and casts ahead
of itself the long-run consequence of immediate prac-
tice and attitude.

70 Slave Citizen :

In the United States, “in every slaveholding state
. . . restrictions . . . have been placed upon the
manumission of Negro slaves. ... In several of the
states domestic manumission, that is, manumission to
take effect within the state is prohibited.” In Mis-
sissippi, Alabama, and Maryland manumission by will
was void. Manumission could not be effected to the
prejudice of creditors, and if the estate proved insol-
vent, manumission by will was of no effect.^*® In states
like Mississippi, Virginia, and Kentucky, where a
widow was entitled to one third of her deceased hus-
band’s estate, slaves emancipated by will could be
held for the satisfaction of the widow’s rights.’®* In
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi
manumission was valid only with the consent of the
state legislature. A fine of two hundred dollars was
visited upon the master in Georgia (i8oi) for at-
tempting to manumit a slave without previous consent
of the legislature, and the slave continued in bond-
age as before. In i8i8 this same state imposed a fine
of one thousand dollars on anyone giving effect to a
last will and testament freeing a slave or permitting
him to work for himself beyond the control of a mas-
ter. In North Carolina (1836-7) a surety of one
thousand dollars was required before manumission for
the guarantee of the freed slave’s good behavior, and

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., pp. 287, 290.

Ibid., pp. 296, 298.

George M. Stroud, op. cit., p. 231,

^he Negro in the Jtmericas 71

the freed slave had to leave the state within ninety
days, never to return. Tennessee (1801) required a
bond, the consent of the court, and immediate depar-
ture from the state; whereas in Mississippi ( i% 22 ')
there had to be an instrument in writing proving to
the General Assembly that the slave nad performed
a meritorious deed, and then a special act sanctioning
the manumission in quest) on.‘®' i'he laws of Virginia
effecting emancipation had undergone many changes.

In Virginia, in 1691, it was provided that a Negro
could noc be set free unless “pay for the transporta-
tion of such negro” out of the “country” within six
months be provided.^®* In 1723 an act provided that
a Negro could be set free only by the action of the
Governor and Council, and only for some “merito-
rious service.” In 1805 Virginia prohibited emancipa-
tion unless the Negro, left the state.^®* In 1824 the
Virginia courts ruled that the freeing of a mother by
will after she reached a certain age did not apply to
her children born after the date of the will.^’® Many
similar statutes were passed in other states.

The slave had no protector to appeal to, and the
master had, in some instances, exceeding power over

Ibid., pp. 219-36.

Helen Tunnicliff Catterall: Judicial Cases Concerning
American Slavery and the NegrOy with additions by James J.
Ha>der. (5 vols., Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institution of
Washington; 1926-1937), Vol. I, p. 72.

Ibid., p. 73.

Ibid., p. 74.

72 Slave and Citizen:

him. An early Jamaican statute provided: “If any
slave by punishment from his owner for running
away, or other ofiFence, suffer in life or limb, none
shall be liable to the law for the same} but whoever
shall kill a slave out of willfulness, wantonness, or
bloody-mindedness, shall suffer three months’ im-
prisonment and pay £50 to the owner of the slave.”
Thus willful murder had been reduced to a misde-
meanor if committed on a slave. But it is more surpris-
ing that if the murder was committed by an indentured
servant, he too could expiate the murder by thirty-
nine lashes and four years’ service.”* Tennessee pro-
vided that the law defining the killing of a slave as
murder should not apply “to any person killing a slave
. . . in the act of resistance ... or dying under
moderate correction.””' The Georgia constitution
safeguards against the charge of murder if the *‘death
should happen by accident in giving such slave mod-
erate correction.” ”* In South Carolina the act of 1 740
provided that willful murder of a slave should cost

Charles Leslie, op. cit., p. 234. The Laws of Jamaicay
Passed by the Assembly and Confirmed by His Majestyy in Coun-
cil Afril 17, 1684 (London, 1684). In 1696 willful killing of a
slave on the second offense was to be considered as murder and pun-
ishable as such without benefit of clergy. Acts of Jamaica j68i—
1757 (London, 1738), p. 8. In 1717 anyone ordering a slave dis-
membered was to pay £ioo (ibid., p. 160).

Charles Leslie, op. cit., p. 234.

George M. Stroud, op. cit., pp. 60-I.

Art. 4, par. 12, in ibid., p. 6l,

T^hc Negro in the ^Americas 73

the perpetrator “seven hundred pounds current
money,” and this law, which remained on the statute
books till 1821, further provided that if the murder
occurred “on sudden heat and passion,” it should cost
him only £350/” But such minor punishments as
willfully cutting out the tongue, putting out the eye,
castrating, scalding, and similar offenses would, ac-
cording to the above law, involve the culprit in a
cost of merely “one hundred pounds of current
money.

Where laws existed protecting the slave against
unusual punishment, they were difficult to enforce be-
cause he was denied the right to testify in the courts.
In the United States, according to Cobb,^” the rule
that slaves could not testify for or against free white
persons was enforced without exception; most of the
states prohibited such testimony by express statute,
others by custom and decision of the courts. In Illinois
and Iowa this prohibition extended to free persons of
color or emancipated slaves. The testimony of any
Negro or mulatto, free or bond, was accepted in Vir-
ginia only in cases where free Negroes and mulattoes
were parties, and in no other case whatsoever.^” Simi-
lar laws were enacted in most of the Southern states.

Ibid., p. 64.

Ibid., p. 66.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., p. 230.

“Revised Code 422,” quoted in George M. Stroud, op, cit.,
p. 300.

74 Slave and Citizen:

The slave had no protector to appeal to, and he
could not have his price specified for purposes of re-
demption and was not allowed to accumulate property
to buy his freedom. The slave could acquire no
property, and if any property came to him, it would
belong to his master j and, being incapable of ac-
quiring property, he could not convey it or give
it away. The laws on this point are numerous. In
Lousiana, “all that a slave possesses belongs to his
master,” and he “cannot dispose or receive by dona-
tion.” In South Carolina, “Slaves cannot take by de-
scent or purchase”} in North Carolina, “Slaves cannot
take by sale, or device, or descent.” As one court put
it, “Our slaves can do nothing in their own right, can
hold no property, can neither buy, sell, barter, nor
dispose of anything without express permission of
master or overseer. . . .” But other states went
further — they denied the right of the slave to own
property, even with the consent of the master. Under
the act of 1740 South Carolina made it illegal for any
slave to “raise and breed for the benefit of such slave,
any horses, mares, cattle, sheep, or hogs under pain of
forfeiture of all such goods, etc.” Georgia punished
the master by a fine of thirty dollars “for every weekly

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., p. 238.

180 William Goodell: The American Slave Code (New York,

1853), p. 90.

Ibid., p. 52.

Ibid., pp. 97~iOO*

iTAe Negro m the ^Americas 75

offence” if he permitted his slave to hire himself out
to another for his own benefit.^** Similar laws were
enacted in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Mis-
souri. In Mississippi a slave could not raise cotton for
his own use, and the master permitting it was fined
fifty dollars. The laws further restricted the hiring
out of slaves to others} Virginia in 1819 made it per-
missible to sell a slave for hiring himself out.^®*

The marriage contract having no validity, none of
its consequences followed. While in a state of slavery,
marriage, even with the master’s consent, produced
no civil eflPect.^®® The question of marriage of the
slave troubled the conscience of good people, and they
attempted to meet the issue posed by the absolute
power of separation by the master.

In 1835, the following query relating to slaves was pro-
pounded to the Savannah River Baptist Association of minis-
ters; Whether, in case of involuntary separation of such a
character as to preclude all further intercourse, the parties
may be allowed to marry again?

ANSWER. — That such separation, among persons situated
as our slaves are, is, civilly, a separation by death, and they

“s Ibid., p. 98.

Ibid., p. 1 01. The states having slaves were so numerous,
the changes in the law so frequent, and their enforcement so
nnc'en at different times that it is impossible to describe every
detail in all of its variations. A special treatise on the law and prac-
tice for every state would be required. But even if the details vary,
in all of the Southern states the tendency to discourage manumis-
sion and to identify the freedman with the slave is clear.

Ibid., p. 107.

76 Slave Citizen:

believe that, in the sight of God, it would be so viewed. To
forbid second marriage in such cases, would be to expose the
parties not only to greater hardships and stronger temptations,
but to church censure for acting in obedience to their mastersy
who cannot be expected to acquiesce in a regulation at vari-
ance with justice to the slaves, and to the spirit of that com-
mand which regulates marriage between Christians. The
slaves are not jree agents^ and a dissolution by death is not
more entirely without their consent and beyond their con-
trol than by such separation.^®*

In 1779 North Carolina prohibited the ownership
of animals by slaves. Mississippi prohibited a master
from allowing his slave to trade like a freeman, and
Maryland from permitting him to keep “stock of any
description,” nor could he acquire money beyond his
wages for the purchase of the freedom of his chil-
dren.*"

There was no custom of freeing the children at the
baptismal font for a nominal price, there was nothing
known of the moral role of the godfather for the slave
child, and the slave family had no status either in
law or in public recognition.

The law recognized no marriage relation between
slaves.*®* There followed no inheritance of blood even
after emancipation,**® and spouses might be witnesses
against each other. It was part of the record that “A

1®* Quoted in William Goodell, op. cit., p. 109.

George M. Stroud, op. cit., p. 81.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., p. 243.

Ibid., p. 245.

l*he l:iis.OKO in the Jtmericas 77

slave never has maintained an action against the vio-
lator of his bed. A slave is not admonished for incon-
tinence, or punished for fornication or adultery j never
prosecuted for bigamy, or petty treason, for killing a
husband being a slave, any more than admitted to an
appeal lor murder.”

Under the law of most of the Southern states, there
was no regard for the Negro family, no question of
the right of the owner to sell his slaves separately, and
no limitation upon separating husband and wife, or
child froxn its mother. That this was so may be seen
from the following advertisements:

Negroes for sale. — A negro woman, 24 years of age,
and her two children, one eight and the other three years old.
Said negroes will be sold separately or together, as desired.
The woman is a good seamstress. She will be sold low for
cash, or exchanged for groceries.

For terms, apply to Matthew Bliss & Co., i Front Levee

\New Orleans Bee^

I WILL GIVE THE HIGHEST CASH PRICE for likely Negroes,
from 10 to 25 years of age,

George Ke;phart
[Alexandria (D, C.) Gazette^

One hundred and twenty negroes for sale. — The
subscriber has just arrived from Petersburg, Virginia, with
one hundred and twenty likely young negroes of both sexes
and every description, which he offers for sale on the most

190 “Opinion of Daniel Dulany, Esq,, Attorney General of
Maryland,” Maryland Reports, 561, 563; quoted in George M.
Stroud, op. cit., p. 99.

yS Slave and Citizen;

reasonable terms. The lot now on hand consists of plough-
boys, several likely and well-qualified house servants of both
sexes, several women with childreny small girls suitable for
nurses, and several small boys without their moth-
ers. Planters and traders are earnestly requested to give the
subscriber a call previously to making purchases elsewherey
as he is enabled to sell as cheap or cheaper than can be sold
by any other 'person in the trade.

Benjamin Davis

(Hamburg, S. C., September 28, 1838)^®^

But even more convincing than the advertisements
is the following record compiled by Frederic C. Ban-
croft from four cargoes of Negroes shipped to New
Orleans in 1834 and 1835:

Of the four cargoes making a total of 646 slaves, 396
were apparently owned by Franklin & Armfield. Among
these there were only two full families: the fathers were 21
and 22 years of age, the mothers 19 and 20, and the children
I and i} 4 « There were 20 husbandless mothers with 33
children, of whom one was 2 weeks old, 4 others were less
than I year old, 19 were from i to 4 years old, and 9 were
from 5 to 12 years of age. The remaining 337 were single
and may be grouped thus:

5

were from

6 to

9 years old,

both

inclusive

68

» »

10 ”

15

99 99

99

99

145

» »

16 ”

21

99 99

99

99

lOI

» 99

22 ”

30

99 99

99

99

9

99 99

31 ”

39

99 99

99

99

8

99 99

40 ”

50

99 99

99

99

1

above

50.

a man of 60.

191

William Goodell, op.

cit.,

pp. S 4 - 5 .

^he Negro in the cAmericas 79

93 per cent of these 337 were from 10 to 30 years of
age.“*

Under the law a slave could not acquire property
by earning it, by gift, or by inheritance. Not having
any property, he could make no will, and could not
take b> descent, “there being in him no inheritable
blood.” In South Carolina slaves were described as
“chattels personal ... to all intents, constructions
and purposes whatsoever.” In Louisiana the slave
“. . . can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire
anything but what must belong to his master.” In
1S06, slaves were defined as real estate. The same
principle ruled in Kentucky, but except for purposes
of sale and execution of debts they were considered
chattel. Most of the states defined slaves as chattel,
and the laws of Maryland (179) ) declared that “In
case the personal property of a ward shall consist of
specific articles such as slaves, working beasts, animals
of any kind, stock furniture, plate, books, and so forth,
the court . . . may at any time pass an order for the
sale thereof.”

Frederic C. Bancroft: Slave'-T fading in the Old South
(Baltimore: J. H. Furst Co.; 1931), p. 63.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., p. 238.

184 William Goodell, op. cit., p. 23.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 25, quoted from A Practical Treatise of the Law
of Slavery^ being a Compilation of all the Decisions made on that
subjecty in the several Courts of the United States^ and State
Courts i with copious notes and references to the Statutes and

8o Slave and . Citizen:

In fact, the issue of female slaves in Maryland was
considered part of the use, like that of other female
animals. Court decisions are cited to the efFect: “Sup-
pose a brood mare is hired for five years, the foals be-
long to him who has a part of the use of the dam. The
slave in Maryland, in this respect, is placed on no
higher or diflFerent grounds.” In fact, the breeding
of slaves for sale as if they were mere cattle came to
be part of the recognized practice of slave and planta-
tion-owners in some, perhaps most, of the slave states.
The practice was of long standing, and seems to have
antedated the abolition of the slave trade, for as far
back as 1796 the following advertisement appeared in
Charleston, South Carolina, offering fifty Negroes
for sale:

. . . they are not Negroes selected out of a larger gang
for the purpose of a sale, but are prime, their present Owner,
with great trouble and expense, selected them out of many
for several years past. They were purchased for stock and
breeding Negroes, and to any Planter who particularly
wanted them for that purpose, they are a very choice ard de-
sirable gang.^®®

In 1 830 Virginia was credited with exporting 8,500
slaves annually. Thomas Jefferson Randolph said:

other authorities, systematically arranged, by Jacob D. Wheeler,
Esq., Counsellor at Law (New York: Allan Pollock, Jr.; New Or-
leans: Benjamin Levy; 1837).

187 William Goodell, op. cit., p. 20.

Quoted in Frederic C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 68, from U. B.
Phillips (editor) : Plantation and Frontier, Vol. II, p. 57.

'The Negro in the itAmerica 8i

“It is a practice, and an increasing practice in parts of
Virginia, to rear slaves for market.” And the pro-
tagonist of slavery Thomas R. Dew, who became
president of William and Mary College in 1836, said
with pride that “Virginia is in fact a negro raising
state for other states j she produces enough for her
own supply, and six thousand for sale. . . . Virgin-
ians can raise [them] cheaper than they can buyj in
fact, it [raising slaves] is one of their greatest sources
of profit.”

This business had its implications and consequences.
The Negro female was reduced to a breeding animal. ■
“She [a girl about twenty years of age] . . . is very
prolific in her generating qualities, and affords a rare
opportunity for any person who wishes to raise a
familyof strong, healthy servants for . . . [his] own
use. . . The emphasis was upon raising chil-
dren, for they could be sold at high prices. The records
show that a child of four was worth $200, and another
of six $150,^®^ while theie are indications of even
higher prices. In 1 857 children of four, five, and eight
years were sold for $376, $400, and $785, respec-

*®* Quoted in Frederic C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 69.

*** Quoted in Frederic C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 71, from
Thomas R. Dew: Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature
of and 1832 (Richmond, 1832).

Quoted by Bancroft, op. cit., p, 74, from the Charleston
Mercury of May 16, 1838.

*** Helen Tunnidiff Catterall, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 186.

82 Slave Citizen:

tively.*®* The thing to do was to breed the Negro girls
young. “A girl of seventeen that had borne two chil-
dren was called a ‘rattlin’ good breeder’ and com-
manded an extraordinary price.” ®®‘ The demise of the
sanctity of marriage had become absolute, and the Ne-
gro had lost his moral personality. Legally he was a
chattel under the law, and in practice an animal to be
bred for the market. The logic of the situation worked
itself out in time, but in the process the moral person-
ality of the slave as a human being became completely
obscured. It is no wonder that the right of redemption
was seemingly nonexistent and the opportunity for
manumission greatly restricted.

The contrast between the United States and Brit-
ish West Indian slave law, on the one hand, and
the Spanish and Portuguese, on the other, was further
heightened by the different role of the church in the
life of the Negro. The slaves in the British West
Indies were almost completely denied the privileges
of Christianity. The plantation-owners opposed the
preaching of the gospel on the grounds that it would
interfere with the management of the slaves, make
them recalcitrant, and put notions of rebellion and

20* Quoted in Frederic C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 79, note, from
Weston: Progress of Slavery y pp. 116—7.

Frederic C. Bancroft, op. cit,, p. 82.

The Negro in the <t/tmericas 83

freedom into their minds. The argument that the
Christian doctrine would make the slaves more obe-
dient, and therefore more docile, found little response
among the planters. More surprising than the atti-
tude of the slave-owners is that of the church itself. It
is little exaggeration to say, as does one writer on the
West Indies, that “The English Church did not recog-
nize them as baptisable human beings.” “““ For in spite
of the fact that the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, organized in 1701, declared through the
mouth of Bishop Fleetwood, in 1710, that the three
hundred Negroes that it had inherited in Barbados
had to be brought into the church, and “that if all the
slaves in America and every island in those seas were
to continue infidels forever, yet ours alone must yet
be Christian,” the church remained indifferent to
its responsibility.

The official church did little indeed for the hun-
dreds and thousands of West Indian Negro slaves.
The Episcopal church confined its own activities to
the whites and left the Negroes to the dissident de-
nominations. But even these came late upon the scene
and found little opportunity to preach the gospel. As
a general rule the missionary preachers were opposed
and ridiculed} in some instances they were driven out.
The Quakers seem to have come first to the island of

Amos K. Fiske: The West Indies^ p. io8.

206 Quoted in the Hon. H. A. Wyndham: The Atlantic and
Slavery y p. 235.

84 Slave and Citizen:

Barbados, but their efforts proved unfruitful, and it
was not till the Moravians established their first settle-
ments in Jamaica, in 1732, that the Protestant gospel
found a voice among the slaves. By 1787 there were
missionary stations, in addition to Jamaica, in Anti-
gua, St. Christopher, and Barbados. But the opposi-
tion to the preaching of the gospel continued into the
nineteenth century and beyond the passage of the act
abolishing the slave trade in 1 807.

This persistent refusal of baptism “touched the
English conscience to the raw,” but custom, tradi-
tion, hostility, and fear on the part of the planters
proved stronger than missionary zeal. As one writer
puts it, “I sincerely believe and am well assured that
the slaves being instructed would be less attentive
to labor, less inclined to obey their overseers and
other deputies, and would be more anxious and more
easily enabled to throw off the yoke of slavery alto-
gether.” In contrast to Spanish provisions, the law
had set up no requirements for the religious training
of the Negroes, and it was not till 1816 that the As-
sembly of Jamaica ordered the vestries to provide
chapels, and the curates to attend on Sunday after-

Charles Booth: Zachafj Macaulay (London, I934)> p. 32.

R. Bickell: The West Indies as They Are (London, 1825),
p. 120. In 1696 the Assembly of Jamaica had suggested that own-
ers and overseers “shall as much as in them lies, endeavor the in-
struction of their slaves in the principle of the Christian religion”
and shall “do their best to fit them for baptism” {Acts of Jamaicay
p. 80).

Hhe Negro in the cAmericas 85

noons for the instruction of the Negroes, and on two
days a week to visit the neighboring plantations for
the same purpose. But action was slow and indifferent,
and as late as 1820 no chapel had been built in spite
of the fact that some ten or twelve curates had by then
been appointed, although some chapels were built
after that.

We thus see that it was only after the abolition of
the slave trade, and when the very institution of
slavery itself was on the verge of extinction in the
Britirh West Indies, that legal action favoring Chris-
tian teaching for the Negroes was adopted. The effect
of all this upon the fortunes of the Negro was very
serious. As he was not a Christian, marriage in his case
was not considered a sacrament and was not encour-
aged. The wife had no legal status and the family, as
such, was not a unit. Legally the British slaves could
not be married, and the religious unions could be dis-
solved .at any time. In the years 1821-5 one devoted
missionary had married, in his own parish, 1,085
couples, and in some of the others the marriages in
this period ranged from one to five,^®® and this in a
slave population of over 300,000, while in most of
the other British West Indies no marriages had ever
taken place. Under an act of the British Parliament,
slaves could be sold by the sheriff in the execution of
all debts.““ It was not uncommon to break up the

209 v/iiiiarn Law Mathieson, op. cit., p, 41.

210 gryan Edwards, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 366.

86 Slave and Citizen:

families of the slaves in the satisfaction of debts as
well as taxes.

Nor can it be said that the church in the United
States was completely unrestricted in preaching the
gospel. A series of regulations governing the assembly
of Negroes for worship before dawn or after dark
seriously interfered with church gatherings; the out-
right prohibition of Negro preachers or official frown-
ing upon them, the opposition to acquisition of literacy
on the part of either slave or freed man, all combined
to restrict the development of a Negro church. And
the white church proved incompetent to preach the
gospel to all the millions of American Negroes. In
South Carolina, in i8oo, it was prohibited for “any
number” of Negroes, mulattoes, or mestizos, even in
company with white persons, to meet together for
mental instruction or religious worship “before sun-
rise or after sunset.” Similar laws prevailed in
many states. In some instances, the church raised its
voice in despair at the situation and acknowledged its
inability to remedy it:

The Presbyterian Synod of South Carrlina and Georgia,
in 1833, published a statement in which they said of the
slaves: “There are over two millions of human being in
the condition of heathen, and some of them in a worse condi-
tion.” “They may justly be considered the heathen of this
country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any
country in the world. The negroes are destitute of the gosfel,
and ever will be under the -present state of things. In the vast

William Goodell, op. cit., p. 329.

Tihe Negro in the <Jtinericas 87

field extending from an entire State beyond the Potomac
[i.e., Maryland] to the Sabine River [at that time our south-
western boundary], and from the Atlantic to the Ohio, there
are, to the best of our knowledge, not twelve men exclusively
devoted to the religious instruction of ^he negroes. In the
present vtate of feeling in the South, a ministry of their own
color could neither be obtained nor tolerated. But do
not the negroes have access to the gospel through the stated
ministry of the whites? We answer, no. The negroes
have no regular and effic ent ministry: as a matter of
course, no churches; neither is there sufficient room in the
white churches for their accommodation. We know of bur
five churches in the slaveholding States, built expressly for
their use. These are all in the State of Georgia. We may now
inquire whether they enjoy the privileges of the gospel in
their own houses, and on our plantations? Again we return
a negative answer. They have no Bibles to read by their own
firesides. They have no family altars; and when in affliction,
sickness, or death, they have no minister to address to them
the consolations of the gospel, nor to bury them with appro-
priate services.^^*

The Methodist church, which was the most active
in evangelizing the Negro in Georgia, in i860 had
25,859 communicants out of 462,198 Negro slaves.

The first Methodist mission was organized by the
South Carolina Conference in 1809. By 1839 there
were 3,864 members, when there were about 280,-
000 Negroes, and in 1857 there were 8,114 Negro
communicants.^^® The Baptist and Episcopal churches

Cited in William Goodell, op, cit., pp. 334-5.

Ralph Betts Flanders: Plantation Slavery in Georgia
(Chapel Hill, I 933 )>P* *78.

88 Slave / zW Citizen:

were also active, though no records of their communi-
cants are available. The general situation, however,
is reflected by the comment of a minister writing in
1858, when he said there “are hundreds of wealthy
persons in our cotton growing sections” who permitted
their slaves to live “in the most profound ignorance
of the simplest truths of Christianity.”

In spite of these criticisms of the church in the
United States, it is still true that, at least after 1 700,
there was no such systematic opposition to teaching
the Christian doctrine to the Negro slave as there was
in the British West Indies. How the teachings of
Christ were reconciled with the complete disregard
of the family and moral status of the slave is a major
mystery. But the record will show numerous instances
of masters encouraging church attendance by their
slaves, and the provision of opportunities for hearing
the gospel preached by white and occasionally even
by colored ministers.*^®

The contrast, therefore, between the Spanish and
Portuguese slave systems on the one hand and that of
the British and the United States was very marked,
and not merely in their effect upon the slave, but even
more significantly upon the place and moral status of
the freed man. Under the influence of the law and
religion, the social milieu in the Spanish and Portu-

Ralph Betts Flanders, op. cit., p. 180.

Gunnar Myrdal: A» Amerkm Dilemma (New York,
1944), Vol. II, pp. 859-60.

The Negro in the ^Americas 89

guese colonies made easy room for the Negroes pass-
ing from slavery to freedom. The older Mediterra-
nean tradition of the defense of the slave, combined
with the eflFect of Latin-American experience, had
prepared an environment into which the Negro freed
from slavery could fit without visible handicap. Slav-
ery Itself carried no taint. It was a misfortune tha: had
befallen a human being, :iad was in itself sufficiently
oppressive. The law and religion both frowned upon
any attempts to convert this into a means of furthei
oppression. A Real Cedulay dated November X4,
1693, and directed to the Captain General of Cuba,
expresses in the name of the King the following very
revealing sentiments:

That after privately calling the masters of these slaves, you
say to them in my name that they must not, for whatever
motive, rigorously tighten the wage they receive from their
slaves, for having been tried in other places, it has proved in-
convenient harming the soi is of these people, which is a mat-
ter for grave scruples that, ^or their own conscience’ sake,
the master must avoid. . . . And at the same time I com-
mand you that if at any time • . . [these masters] mistreat
them [the slaves] you will apply the necessary remedy. It is
not just to consent to, or permit any excess in this matter, for
their slavery is a sufficient sorrow without at the same time
suffering the distempered rigour of their masters. . .

Quoted in Jose Antonio Saco, op. cit., Tomo II, pp. 169—
70. We may contrast this with the following by Abel P. Upshur,
Secretary of State of the United States, to Edward Everett, United
States Minister to Great Britain, Washington, September 28,
1843:

90 Slave and . Citizen;

If the law was solicitous to protect the Negro slave
against abuse and defended him as a human being, the
church opened its doors to him as a Christian, and as
early as the eighteenth century in Brazil there were
not only Negro priests, but even black bishops. And
in Brazil, anyway, the Negro clergy seem to "have
been more reverent, better living, more earnest than
the Portuguese clergy.” Many things had con-
spired to give the Negro in America a special place in
the community. The fact that he had come with the
conqueror, that in a measure he was part of the con-
quering host, that he was used by the whites as boss
and foreman over Indians in Mexico, Venezuela, and
other places, the fact that he, unlike the Indian, had
learned the language of his masters and taken many
of his habits and customs, all combined to identify
him with the European community and make him
part of it. In every instance the Negro participated
with the whites in their wars on equal terms, and in
some of them he achieved the prestige of a national

“No man who knows anything of his own nature can suppose
it to be possible that two races of men, distinguished by external
and ineffaceable marks obvious to every eye, who had held to-
wards each other from time immemorial the relation of master
and slave, could ever live together as equals, in the same country
and under the same Government. If, therefore, slavery be abol-
ished, the one or the other of the races must leave the country
or be exterminated. This would be for the slaves, because they
are the weaker party.” From William R. Manning, op. cit., Vol.
VII, p. 12.

Sir Harry Johnston, op. cit., p. 90.

"The ^iE.G^o in the eAmericas 91

hero. Thus in Brazil one of the two national heroes,
dating from early colonial wars against the Dutch, is
Henrique Dias. In Brazil, too, the Negroes had estab-
lished their reputation for physical courage and mili-
tary prowess in their mighty defense of the Negro
Republic of Palmares (1650-96), which required an
army of six thousand men and many years to des^^roy.
In the wars for independence the Negro was an im-
portant element, and in L.uba the Negroes provided
a majority of the army in the long struggle against
Spain.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the political and
social environment in Latin America has proved dif-
ferent. Not only was the Negro encouraged to secure
his freedom, but once he was free, no obstacles were
placed to his incorporation into the community, in so
far as his skills and abilities made that possible. In
Brazil the Negroes had done all of the work during
the colonial period. It v/as in their ranks that all of
the skills, crafts, and arts were to be found, and it was
from the ranks of the Negroes and mulattoes that
some of the great artists, musicians, and sculptors
were drawn. Rich planters in Brazil often educated
their bright mulatto children and even sent them to
Lisbon in pursuit of learning. Negro slaves were often
specially educated in specific arts, and Kostcr notes
an instance of a planter who had trained up a private
band of musicians by sending some of them to Rio

Henry Koster, op. cit., p. 174.

92 Slave Citizen:

and others to Lisbon. The ranks of the regular army
were open to free Negroes and mulattoes, and special
Negro regiments were common, sometimes with their
own Negro officers, not merely in Brazil but in Cuba
and during the revolution for independence in Vene-
zuela.

A peculiar feature of the slave system in Brazil and
in other areas was the large plantations belonging to
difiFerent religious orders, like those of the Francis-
cans, the Dominicans, and the Society of Jesus. On
these plantations the Negroes were especially well
treated and protected, their moral and religious train-
ing was looked after, and they were almost never sold.
In fact, the Negroes on these plantations considered
themselves as belonging to the saint rather than to the
friars who looked after them.“*

Upon gaining their freedom, the Negroes and their
children found openings in private and public employ-
ment and even in public office. And if the question of
color was raised, it became evident that the office
weighed more than the color, so that a mulatto cap-
tain was declared to be white. This happened even in
cases of the nobility in Brazil. Where a Negro prob-
ably could not have found a place, a mulatto could;
how could a member of the nobility be anything but
white? Free Negroes had the same rights before
the law and were allowed to hold property and, from

Henry Koster, op. cit., pp. 217-8.

Hon. H. A. Wyndhani, op. cit., p. 250.

T he '^'EG'R.o in the (Jtmericas 93

the beginning, take part in public life. The Negro,
in fact, had acquired a moral personality while slav-
eiy still flourished. For all of these rights were en-
joyed by the Negro when slavery was still in effect,
and when hundreds of thousands and in some Instances
millions of his fellow blacks were still suffering the
evils of slavery.

Nothing said above must induce the reader to be-
lieve that slavery was anything but cruel. It was often
brutal. The difference between the systems lies in the
fact that in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies ♦'he
cruelties and brutalities were against the law, that
they were punishable, and that they were perhaps not
so frequent as in the British West Indies and the
North American colonies. But these abuses had a
remedy at law, and the Negro Lad a means of escape
legally, by compulsory sale if the price were offered,
and by many other means. More important was the
fact that the road was open to freedom, and, once
free, the Negro enjoyed, on the whole, a legal status
equal to that of any other subject of the King or to
that of any other citizen of the state. And if the ques-
tion of color was an issue, he could purchase “white-
ness” for a specific price.

If we now contrast the position of the freed Negro
and people of color in the British possessions with
those we have just described, it will become evident
that whereas freedom in one place meant moral status,
in the other it meant almost the opposite. In the Brit-

94 Slave aW Citizen:

ish West Indies the achievement of manumission
merely involved a release from the obligation to serve
a special master. It did not carry with it any new
rights, or, as Edwards puts it, “the courts of law inter-
preted the act of manumission by the owner, as noth-
ing more than an abandonment, or release of his own
proper authority over the person of the slave, which
did not, and could not, convey to the object of his
bounty, the civil and political rights of a natural-born
subject} and the same principle was applied to the
issue of freed mothers, until after the third genera-
tion from the Negro ancestor.” In most of the is-
lands freed Negroes or mulattoes could not give evi-
dence in court against white persons or even against
people of color. They were thus less protected than
slaves, who had their master to defend them against
abuse or maltreatment. They were not permitted to
serve even as petty officers of public trust, as in paro-
chial vestries, or as constables. They could not hold
office in the black militia, they could not vote. By a
law of 1762 in Jamaica, they were deprived of the
right to inherit more than £2,000, unless born of law-
ful marriage.®^^ It was not until 1796 that people of
color were allowed to give evidence in court against
whites. Freed Negroes could not be tried by jury and

Bryan Edwards, op. cit., p. 217.

222 ‘‘Laws of Jamaica,” from John Henry Howard. Laws of
tha British Colonies in the West Indies and Other Parts of Atner-
tea (2 vols., London, 1827), VoL II, p. 58.

'The Negro in the tAmericas 95

were subject to the same procedure as slaves. Freed
persons could not even testify against slaves till after
1748. It was not until 1824 that free Negroes we^'e
permitted to give evidence in the courts under oath.
One slave-owner reports:

The murder was committed in the presence of several Ne-
groes; but Negroes are not allowed to give eviden''^’, and as
no free person was present, there are not only doubts whether
the murderer will be punisl.t-l, but whether he can even be
put upon his trial.*'^

One of the difficulties in the situation was the fact
that the Negroes, not being, as a general rule, mem-
bers of the Christian church, were considered incapa-
ble of taking an oath and, being deprived of that
privilege, were automatically eliminated from all re-
sponsibilities and opportunities vvherein the taking of
an oath was a prerequisite.

The position of the manumitted Negro, or even of
the mulatto born of a fi ee mother, was not propitious.
The legal and social environment was discriminatory
and hostile. The English community opposed manu-
mission, feared the growth of free colored people, and
reduced those few who had found a route to freedom
to as nearly a servile state as possible. In the United
States a very similar policy toward freedmen devel-
oped. An act of manumission was merely a with-
drawal of the rights of the master. It did not confer

M. G. Lewis: Journal of a West India Proprietor, i8is~‘
17, p. 328.

96 Slave and Citizen:

citizenship upon the freedmen. That power rested
with the state.*“ They were not privileged to bear
arms, they had to have a guardian to stand in the rela-
tion of a patron to them, and in some instances they
were denied the right to purchase slaves as property.
They tended to be placed on the same footing as
slaves in their contact with whites.

A free colored person could be enslaved for assist-
ing a runaway slave, for being suspected as a slave by
white witnesses and unable to prove the contrary, and
for inability to pay a fine. Though free in the North,
he could be enslaved by entering a slave state
(Georgia or Maryland) or for marrying a slave. Mis-
sissippi, in 1831, required all free colored persons
over sixteen and under sixty to leave the state in
ninety days unless they could secure a certificate of
good character from the county courts. A free colored
man had his ears cut off for striking a white man in
Maryland, and was denied trial by jury in South
Carolina. In North Carolina he could not preach the
gospel, nor trade out of the city where he resided. In
South Carolina free Negro seamen arriving in port
could be taken from the ship and imprisoned at the
expense of the ship’s master.**® These restrictions
placed the freedmen but little above the slaves in re-
spect to dvil privileges. The penal slave code usually
applied to freedmen. South Carolina, in 1740, im-

Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. cit., p. 313.

226 William Goodell, op. cit., pp. 356-6^.

Hhe Negro in the iflmertcas gy

posed a penalty of one hundred dollars on anyone
who used a Negro as a scribe or taught him how to
write, and this law was further strengthened in
1834 to punish a free person of color by fifty lashes
for the same offense.““^ Similar laws were adopted in
a number of other states. The law, the church, and
social policy all conspired to prevent the identification
of the liberated Negro with the community. He was
to be kept as a separate, a lesser, being. In spite of be-
ing manumitted, he was not considered a free moral
agent.

The different slave systems, originating under
varying auspices, had achieved sharply contrasting
results. If we may use such a term, the milieu in Latin
America was expansive and the attitude pliable. The
Negro may have been racially a new element, but
slavery was a known and recognized institution —
known especially to the law. The law had long since
struggled with the subtleties of freedom and servi-
tude and over a period of centuries had created an
elaborate code for the slave, and the new Negro slave
was automatically endowed with the immunities con-
tained in the ancient prescription. He was no stranger
to the law. His obligation and freedoms within the
code were both known. In fact, the element of human
■personality was not lost in the transition to slavery
from Africa to the Spanish or Portuguese dominions.

George M. Stroud, op. dt., p. 139.

Ibid., p. 240.

98 Slave Citizen:

He remained a person even while he was a slave. He
lost his freedom, but he retained his right to become
free again and, with that privilege, the essential ele-
ments in moral worth that make freedom a possibility.
He was never considered a mere chattel, never de-
fined as unanimated property, and never under the
law treated as such. His master never enjoyed the
powers of life and death over his body, even though
abuses existed and cruelties were performed. Even
if justice proved to be blind, the blindness was not
incurable. The Negro slave under this system had
both a juridical and a moral personality, even while
he was in bondage.

This legal tradition and juridical framework were
strengthened by the Catholic religion and were part
of its doctrine and practice. It made him a member of
the Christian community. It imposed upon both the
slave and the master equal obligations to respect and
protect the moral personality of the other, and for
practical purposes it admitted the slave to the privi-
leges of the sacraments. In the mundane world it
meant that marriage was a sacred union that could not
be broken by mere caprice, that the slave had a right
to his wife, and that the slave’s family was, like other
families, a recognized union in a moral universe, not
different from that of his master’s family. Here,
again, the religious prescriptions were perhaps as
often violated as obeyed. But both the state and the

T!he Negro in tJie ^Americas 99

church combined to maintain the principle of the rule
by the exercise of civil and canon law. The church
could and did thunder its opposition to the sins com-
mitted against the family — against all Christian
families, regardless of color and regardless of status.
The church, further, in its emphasis upon the moral
equality between master and slave, came to favor
manumission and to make it a deed laudable in the
sight of God.

The legal right to achieve freedom and the reli-
gious favoring of manumission, combined with a num-
ber of other features peculiarly American, tended to
make easy the path to freedom. That it was easy is
seen by the large numbers of freedmen everywhere in
Latin America during the colonial period and after
independence.

It was the opinion of de Pons that in the Spanish
colonies there were more freedmen and children of
freediueu than slaves, and he cites for Venezuela,
out of a total population of 728,000, freedmen to the
number of 291,000, or over 40 per cent of the total.
In Cuba, the hundred and three years between 1774
and 1877, for which we seem to have a fairly accu-
rate record, the percentage of freedmen to slaves
never fell below 32 per cent of the slave population,
and in spite of the constant importation of new Ne-

F. R. de Pons: Travels in South America (2 vols., London,
1807), Vol. I, pp. 168-9.

lOO

Slave and Citizen;

groes the freedmen were 41 per cent in 1774, and
over 55 per cent in 1877.*^® It has been estimated that
in Brazil at the time of the emancipation there were
three times as many free Negroes as slaves. In con-
trast, the total of free persons of color in the British
West Indies was small. Cuba alone, in 1827, had 20,-
000 more free Negroes than all of the British Carib-
bean islands.®*®

Endowing the slave with a moral personality be-
fore emancipation, before he achieved a legal equal-
ity, made the transition from slavery to freedom
easy, and his incorporation into the free community
natural. And as there were always large numbers of
freedmen and children of freedmen, it never seemed
especially dangerous to increase their number. There
was never the question that so agitated people both
in the West Indies and in the United States — the
danger of emancipation, the lack of fitness for free-
dom. There was never the horrifying spectacle so
often evoked in the United States of admitting a mor-
ally inferior and therefore, by implication, a biologi-
cally inferior people into the body politic on equal
terms.

In this matter of slavery the experience of the na-
tions other than those of the Iberian Peninsula was
very different. They had long since lost all vestiges
of slavery and a slave code. In neither tradition, pol-

Fernando Ortiz, op. cit., pp. 321—2.

280 William Law Mathieson, op. cit., p. 40.

H he Negro in the nAmericas i o i

icy, nor law was there room for the slave. We are told
that “In the Eleventh of Elizabeth (1569) cart-
wright brought a slave from Russia, and would
scourage him, for which he was questioned, and it was
resolved, that England was too pure an air for slaves
to breathe in.” And Cobb generalizes: “That the
colonies having adopted the common law, and Negro
slavery having no existence in Great Britain, there
could be necessarily no provision of that law in refer-
ence to it, and consequently the power of the master
until limited by legislation was absolute.” In
neither tradition, policy, nor law was there room for
the slave. The law did not know him and could not
make provision for him when he came upon the scene.
The same is true of public practice and policy. The
fact that the slave was a Negro merely added to the
confusion} it did not create it. What made the diffi-
culty was that when the first slave was brought in
contact with the English, they did not know what to
do with him. There was no recognizable place for
him in the law. He certainly was not a free man. And
the law did not know a slave.

It was therefore no accident that in the early days,
both in the West Indies and in the American colonies,
he was, in practice, assimilated with the indentured
servant. Bui this effort was of short duration and

John Rushworth: Historical Collections, quoted in Helen
TunnlcllfF Catterall, op. cit., Vol. I, p, l.

232 'Thomas R. R. Cobb, op. clt., p. 89.

102 Slave Citizen:

broke down, among other reasons, because the slave
was not an indentured servant. The master had a con-
tractual relation with the indentured servant} there
was no such contractual relation with the Negro slave.
The indentured servant’s time was limited by con-
tract to a specified number of years, after which he
was to be free. The master assumed with the inden-
tured servant a certain number of future obligations.
The indentured relationship was recognized by both
sides as temporary and dischargeable by a specified
emolument. The Indentured servant was Christian,
had his rights to his wife and children, over whom the
master could exercise no legal compulsions. None of
these terms fitted the slave. He had been bought from
a third person. There was no time limit to the con-
tract, there was no pecuniary obligation upon the mas-
ter after the contract expired, and, finally, the Negro
slave had no legal family. The master had bought the
slave, the women, and the children, paying sepa-
rately for each. The slave had no rights in law and ac-
quired none by contract. The legal perplexity was real
enough. This was made worse by the position of the
Protestant churches. The slow, hesitant, and doubt-
ful approach to the problem of conversion merely in-
creased the legal isolation of the Negro within the
community, because as a Christian he would have ac-
quired certain immunities and privileges belonging
to all members of the established church. But the es-
tablished church was inordinately slow in moving to

The in tJie c/lmericas 103

bring him into the fold, and the dissident churches
were not very successful nor very much respected in
their endeavors until nearly the end of slavery as an
institution in the West Indies.

In the absence of either religious or legal provision
for the slave, it was not illogical for the planters, both
in the West Indies and in the American colonies, to
settle the legal issue involved by legally defining the
slave as chattel. If he was neither a free man nor an
indenturea servant, then declaring him to be chattel
disposed of the puzzle legally. But having once made
this decision, the definition of the Negro brought in
its train a whole series of consequences, both for the
Negro and for the white community, which are re-
flected even at the present time. For as chattel the
Negro slave lost all claims upon legal protection.
The powers of the master were enormously increased,
and, by definition, the Negro slave was reduced to a
beast of the field. While the impact of the law did
not and could not completely wipe out the fact that
the Negro slave was human, it raised a sufficient bar-
rier to make the humanity of the Negro difficult to
recognize and legally almost impossible to provide
for. This legal definition carried its own moral con-
sequences and made the ultimate redefinition of the
Negro as a moral person most difficult.

The abolition of slavery found both the Negro and
the white community unprepared for freedom. In the
case of the Negro, there was almost a complete lack

104 Slave Citizen:

of preparation for the responsibilities characteristic of
freedom. The number of freedmen was infinitesimal,
their role in the free community greatly restricted,
and they proved incompetent to absorb and direct the
large body of slaves suddenly freed. The denial of a
moral status to the slave as a human being was to
prove the greatest handicap to drawing the Negro
into the general community, and to giving the whites
that readiness for the acceptance of the free Negro
which would have facilitated the transition. Some-
thing of the same course, but much more disastrous in
its consequence, worked itself out in the United States.
Here, as in the West Indies, the early attempts to
identify the slave with the indentured servant broke
down and the Negro was reduced to chattel. Here,
too, the bias was in favor of slavery and against manu-
mission, and the few Negroes who achieved the status
of freedmen were frowned upon, isolated, discrimi-
nated against, and even expelled from many of the
slave states. All of this does not deny the many thou-
sands of instances of kindness, affection, and under-
standing between master and slave, but these were
personal and with no standing in the law. Legally
there was no effective remedy against abuse and no
channel toward freedom. With us there were not, as
in Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela, large numbers of
freedmen while slavery still existed, and with us the
slave had no moral status as a human being, and the
Negro no experience in freedom.

T" he in the c^mericas 105

The different ways in which slavery was finally
abolished in the two areas illumine the social process
of which they were an integral part. In the Latin-
American area slavery and freedom were, socially and
morally speaking, very close to each other. The pas-
sage from slavery to freedom was always possible
for the individual, and in practice frequent. There was
nothing final or inescapable in the slave status. In
fact, the contrary was the case. The social structure
was malleable, the gap between slavery and freedom
narrow and bridgeable, and almost any slave could
hope that either he or his family would pass over from
his side of the dividing line to the other. Easy manu-
mission all through the period meant that there were
always a large numbei’ of people in the community who
had formerly been slaves and were now free. This
is one of the two crucial differences between the char-
acter and the outcome of the slave institution in the
Latin-American scene on one hand and in the United
States on the other. The second basic difference was
to be found in the position of the freedman after
manumission. In fact, in Latin America there was for
legal and practical purposes no separate class of freed-
men. The freedman was a free man.**® In the Latin-
American slave system the easy and continuous

2s» Tiiere were exceptions to this general statement that could
be cited in so large an area and for a period of over three centuries,
but both hw and practice were bent in the direction of giving the
Negro, once freed, a free man^s rights.

io6 Slave and Citizen:

change of status implied a process of evolution and a
capacity for absorption within the social structure that
prevented the society from hardening and kept it from
becoming divided. We are here face to face with an
evolutionary social process that did not allow for a
horizontal stratification and favored passage verti-
cally from slavery to freedom. There is, in fact, from
this point of view, no slave system} there are only
individual slaves. There is no slave by nature, no ab-
solute identification of a given group of individuals
as slaves, to whom and to whose children the hope of
escape from the hardships they are sufFering is for-
ever denied.

If in Latin America the abolition of slavery was
achieved in every case without violence, without
bloodshed, and without civil war, it is due to the fact
that there was no such fixed horizontal division, no
such hardening of form that the pattern could no
longer change by internal adaptations. In the Latin-
American area the principle of growth and change
had always been maintained. In the United States the
very opposite had come to pass. For reasons of histori-
cal accident and conditioning, the Negro became iden-
tified with the slave, and the slave with the eternal
pariah for whom there could be no escape. The slave
could not ordinarily become a free man, and if chance
and good fortune conspired to endow him with free-
dom, he still remained a Negro, and as a Negro, ac-
cording to the prevailing belief, he carried all of the

’The Negro in the <tAmertcas 107

imputation of the slave inside him. In fact, the Negro
was considered a slave by nature, and he could not
escape his natural shortcomings even if he managed
to evade their legal consequences. Freedom was made
difficult of achievement and considered undesirable
both for the Negro and for the white man’s commu-
nity in which the Negro resided. The distinction had
been drawn in absolute terms, not merely between
the slave and the free i san, but between the Negro
and the white man. The contrast was between color
— the Negro was the slave, and the white man was
the free man. Attributes of a sharply different moral
character were soon attached to these different ele-
ments in the population, and they became incompati-
ble with each other. They might as well, so far as the
theory was concerned, have been of a different species,
for all of the things denied to the Negro as a slave
were permitted to the white man — as a citizen. Our
Southern slave-holding community had by law and
custom, by belief and practice, developed a static in-
stitutional ideal, which it proceeded to endow with a
high ethical bias.

Calhoun stated the case succinctly and forcibly:

It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty,
but, what is greater (if to freemen anything can be), exist-
ence itself. The relation which now exists between the two
races in the slave-holding States has existed for two centuries.
It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our
strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions.

io8 Slave and Citizen:

civil and political. None other can be substituted. We will
not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed. . . . Come what
will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent
of property, we must defend ourselves ; and if compelled, we
would stand justified by all laws, human and divine . . . we
would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to
us but one alternative, — to triumph or perish as a people.
... I ask neither sympathy nor compassion for the slave-
holding States. We can take care of ourselves. It is not we,
but the Union, which is in danger. . . . We cannot remain
here in an endless struggle in defence of our character, our
property and institutions.^®*

By one of those peculiar tricks which time and ex-
perience sometimes play on man, the accident of Ne-
gro labor had been converted into a moral and eco-
nomic philosophy. It seemed to the South that the
best of all societies had now been achieved, and by di-
vine prescription it was to remain unchanged forever.
But the social milieu had ceased to be pliable and had
therefore ceased to be tolerable in the scheme of
things. A social pattern no longer open to change has,
in fact, quite unconsciously signed its own death war-
rant. Just at the very moment when the system seems
most perfected, when the structure seems most com-
plete, and when inner peace and harmony seem to
give the way of life a kind of perfection, the cracks
in the structure make their appearance, the fission be-
comes evident, and the changes so long resisted pre-

*** Dr. H. von Holst: John C, Calhoun (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin &Co.s 1891), p. 133.

"The Negro in the t^Americas 109

cipitate a cataclysm. That only a violent upheaval
could change the slavery system in the South was
clearly seen by Calhoun:

To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this
prosperity [of the Southern states], and to place the two races
in a stati of conflict, which must end in the ..-xpulsicn or ex-
tirpation of one or the other. No other can be substituted
compatible with their peace or security. The diflficully is in
the diversity of the races. So strongly drawn is the line be-
tween the two in consequence, and so strengthened by the
force of habic and education, that it is impossible for them to
exist together in the community, where their numbers are so
neaiiy equal as in the slave-holding States, under any other
relation than that which now exists. Social and political equal-
ity between them is impossible. No power on earth can over-
come the difficulty. The causes lie too deep in the principles
of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality,
to change the present condition of the African race, were it
possible, would be to change the form of slavery.^®®

Revolution is the natural consequence of stratifica-
tion. The abolition of slavery in the United States
was cataclysmic and violent just because it seemed so
eternal, so faultless, just because the gap between the
Negro and the white man had been made so impas-
sable and so absolute that it could not be bridged by
any means of transition, by any natural growth and
adaptation. It was broken by violence and war and
social catastrophe because it could not be molded by
other means. Revolution was the result because

Ibid., p. 141.

no Slave Citizen:

change as a principle had been denied. The fact that
the Civil War was begun on the issue of secession is
immaterial. Secession itself was but a final evidence of
how stratified the Southern complex had become. It
could not change from within, and it was therefore
broken by force from without. The great lesson in
this experience lies in the eventual outcome inherent
in the two slave institutions. The principle of manu-
mission provided Latin-American slavery a means of
change. The denial of manumission encrusted the so-
cial structure in the Southern states and left no escape
except by revolution, which in this case took the form
of a civil war.

It is, therefore, not entirely an accident that^the
abolition of slavery in the United States was achieved
within the painful experience of a civil war, and fol-
lowed by the almost equally painful and disintegrat-
ing process of a period of reconstruction.***

236 Professor William L. Westermann in a conversation with
me has pointed out that when the definition of slavery was sym-
bolized by the Negro, it spelled the death knell of slavery itself
within the European cultural area. Slavery is an ancient and uni-
versal institution in human experience. It was an accepted, even
if not an honored, way of life. The slave was always legally at the
bottom of the scale. He had the least claims upon consideration
and the fewest prerogatives among living men. But the slave’s in-
feriority was largely legal rather than moral. Certainly that was
true in the Greek city-state period and in the ancient world after
the days of the Middle Stoic group and the early Christian fathers.
Anyone might become a slave — the accidents of war or poverty
might force even the best men into the position of belonging to

The Negro in the ^Americas 1 1 1

The Civil War gave the Negro legal equality with
his former masters, but it could not and did not give
him either the experience in the exercise of freedom
or the moral status in the sight of his white fellow
citizens to make the freedom of the Negro an accept-

another, either temporarily or permanently. It was a misfortune
when it occurred. It was not an evidence of baseness, except in
cases where men were made slaves as a punishment for crime.
But, in any case, slavery was of a nature that was independent of
race, or even of class, for a soldier belonging to the “best family”
might be tal^en in war and enslaved.

Slavery had no identification until modern time with any one
race. As a general rule in antiquity it did not involve the assump-
tion of congenital or racial inferiority. But when, as a result of the
discovery of the Western World, the people out of Africa were
forced to migrate to the other side of the Atlantic by many mil-
lions, slavery and the Negro came to be synonymous. The Negro
became the slave. The Indian, except under very restricted cir-
cumstances, and only for a very few years, was also a slave, but
for all practical purposes the slave and the black man were identi-
fiable in the minds of the Europeans and people of European
culture.

The results of this change were unexpected. For one thing,
slavery became a moral issue, something it had never been before.
If only the Negro could be a slave — only the Negro and no one
else — the question soon arose: why the Negro? A whole series of
explanations was soon devised to justify slavery for the Negro.
The justifications were numerous and many-sided, finding support
in Biblical as well as presumably scientific sources. But the mere
fact that slavery had to be justified left the question open to
doubt. Men began to ask, why the Negro? On what grounds and
for what reasons? If slavery is just, then it must include other
peoples as well; otherwise it was not acceptable to the conscience
of Europe, at least to the extent of fully quieting Europe’s con-
science on the matter. And if reasons could be adduced on one

1 12

Slave and Citizen:

able and workable relationship for them. The endow-
ing of the Negro with a legal equality left a moral
vacuum that remained to be filled in. In Latin Amer-
ica the Negro achieved complete legal equality
slowly, through manumission, over centuries, and
after he had acquired a moral personality. In the
United States he was given his freedom suddenly,
and before the white community credited him with
moral status.

Herein lies the great contrast between the outcome
of the two slave systems. The last eighty years in the
United States may be characterized as a period within
which the Negro has been struggling for moral status
in the sight of the white community. It has been a
painful and, for the Negro, often a disillusioning ef-
fort. But it cannot be denied that progress has been

side, they could also be adduced on the other. The entire ques-
tion of slavery itself as a moral institution came to be questioned
and finally repudiated. As long as slavery was something that any-
one might suffer, then it could be looked upon as a misfortune.
When it became identified solely with the Negro, then it became
a matter of doubt whether any man ought to be permitted to
suffer it. Interestingly enough, the Negro himself became a party
to the argument and denied the imputation that he, of all people,
had been selected to be the eternal pariah of the race. Educated
Negroes in some countries became important in the agitation
against slavery. Slavery was therefore finally abolished for the
Negro, within the European frame of reference, on moral
grounds, because it was unjust that any one race should be so
singled out. When Negro slavery was abolished, slavery was abol-
ished. The issue had been so stated during the agitation over Negro
slavery that by implication all slavery had become unjust.

Hhe Negro in the Jtmericas 1 13

made, and the moral position of the Negro wthin the
American community is today much better than it was
in 1865, the day after the Emancipation.

One must always remember that the Negro started
after the Civil War with nothing at allj he had neither
education, nor property, nor position, uor the psycho-
logical readiness for achievement and personal
growth. To have gone so far and to have accom-
plished so much in eighty years is a very great accom-
plishment indeed. To have done it against the preju-
dice, denial, and opposition with which his path has
been strewn bespeaks both spiritual resilience and
purposefulness. The record in the face of the same
kind of handicaps has probably never been equaled
before.

It is true, however, that the achievement is also
evidence of a pliability in the American milieu, and
an indication that belief in the right of all men to
equal opportunity is not mere lip service. At least, one
would have to say that the American environment
since the Civil War was provided a permissive setting,
so that some of the least privileged, as the Negro has
been, could prove their worth and find access to the
best that the culture has had to offer. But the test of
acceptance lies in a somewhat different <^rection. The
issue is a subtle one and hard to state. It is not enough
to say, as we often do, that there are so many Negro
doctors, lawyers, politicians, business men, and schol-
ars. It is requisite that there should not be Negro doc-

1 14 Slave Citizen:

tors, Negro lawyers, or Negro scholars. Their profes-
sional standing must overshadow their racial origin.
It is only when we can say he is a great actor, a great
scholar, a great lawyer, a great citizen that the step
has been taken which endows the Negro with the moral
worth as a man which obliterates the invidious dis-
tinction and sweeps away the condescending fawning
of the better-than-thou attitude. When the time does
come that a Negro judge on the bench is a judge and
not a Negro judge, when a Negro scholar is a scholar
and not a Negro scholar, then the process of identifi-
cation will be on its way to fulfillment, and the gap
between legal equality and moral acceptance will be
obliterated.

The pointing up of racial conflicts and injustices is
important. But the frictions are a healthy sign. They
indicate a many-sided contact between the two races.
The frictions are an evidence of the fact that the
Negro and the white man live in the same commu-
nity and quarrel over the same values. As long as the
two races are striving and disagreeing over the mani-
fold issues of living in the same culture, then it means
that they are engaged in the painful process of accom-
modation to each other and to the world. The real
danger would be if the Negro managed to live in a
vacuum where there was no friction between him and
his white neighbors} then there would be real danger
of the developing of a perpetual caste system. It is de-
sirable that nothing should remain static until the is-

Hhe N EGRO in the z/tmericas 1 1 5

sues over which the friction arises have themselves
ceased to trouble either the whites or the blacks. To
want peace when the contrasts are so great is to dream
of an unreal world. To expect either the white or the
Negro community to show neither anger nor hate,
neither fear nor violence, when their values ai e chal-
lenged and their aspirations are frustrated is to ask
for the impossible. It is not specific evils that we must
complain of — they are to be dealt with by the police
and public authorities. It is the general direction
which gives the evils their pertinence that is the sig-
nificant issue, and, from that point of view, the fric-
tion is a good thing. It shows that the evils com-
plained of are alive, troublesome, and impelling.
They force men to do something about them. They
will do many wrong things abou! them, but, by the
same token, many right ones.

The nature of our problem is conditioned by the
time it will take for the Negro to have acquired a
moral personality equal to his legal one. How long
that will take is not predictable, but what is generally
called the “solution” of the Negro problem is essen-
tially a matter of establishing the Negro in the sight
of the white community as a human being equal to
its own members. When that finally occurs, then the
problem will have solved itself. It will have disap-
peared But such an eventuality is a matter of time,
and here, too, the Spanish and Portuguese peoples
have a great advantage over the Americans. They

ii6 Slave Citizen:

have lived with the Negro much longer than we have.
Negroes were first brought to Portugal in 1442, and
in considerable numbers following that date, while
the first Negro slaves to reach Virginia came in 1619,
a hundred and seventy-seven years later. It will be the
year 2122 before the Americans will have had as long
a contact with the Negro as the Latin Americans now
have. Taking the progress that has been made in the
eighty years since the Emancipation, there is some
hope that the Negro will, in time, have achieved in
the United States as good a relationship as he now en -
joys in Latin America. In fact, it may not be unrea-
sonable to assume that the Negro in the United States,
because of the greater opportunities available in our
midst, will have forged a position no less favorable
morally, and economically better, long before he has
filled the time span during which he has sojourned
among the Iberian people.

This will be easier because, in spite of the sharp
contrast here drawn, the slave systems in Latin and
Anglo-Saxon America were not institutions differing
absolutely one from the other. Differences there were,
and important ones, but they were differences of de-
gree rather than in kind. The institution of slavery
had logic of its own. Wherever it existed in this hemi-
sphere it worked its way into the social structure and
modified the total society. The slave system was
broader in its impact than might be discerned from a
reading of the slave laws. The law itself was but evi-

^he Negro in the c^mericas 1 17

dence of the influence of slavery as an institution upon
the mores. In fact, so inclusive was the influence of
slavery that it might be better to speak, not of a system
of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, or the United States, but
of the total pattern as a slave society. Slavery was not
something apart from the world in which it existed.
It was merely one facet of the world and cannot, in its
influence, be separated from or described apart from
the total community. Wherever we had slavery, we
had a slave society, not merely for the blacks, but
for the whites, not merely for the law, but for the
family, not merely for the labor system, but for the
culture — the total culture. Nothing escaped, noth-
ing was beyond or above or outside the slave institu-
tion} the institution was the society in all of its mani-
festations.

The social structure is dynamic and not static. In
spite of every effort so to define the role of the Negro
as to make him chattel or real estate for the purpose
of legal treatment, he was still a human being. The
Negro, by his presence, changed the form of the state,
the nature of property, the system of law, the organi-
zation of labor, the role of the church as well as its
character, the notions of justice, ethics, ideas of right
and wrong. Slavery influenced the architecture, the
clothing, the cooking, the politics, the literature, the
morals of the entire group — white and black, men
and women, old and young. Nothing escaped, noth-
ing, and no one. Everywhere in this New World of

ii8 Slave Citizen:

ours a slave system made a slave society, with all of
the mores of a slave society. Important as the differ-
ences between Brazil and the United States were, the
similarities were undoubtedly greater. Slavery proved
a pervasive influence that enveloped all of life and
patterned it in a way peculiar to itself.

It is a problem both in theory and in fact. In theory
we must say that any change occurring in any part of
the social structure affects the entire society. That is
true even if the particular society has a rigid class or
caste system. Any influence that affects the lowest
stratum makes its way upwards and modifies the high-
est caste. There is no such thing as isolating or segregat-
ing a social phenomenon. It works its way throughout
the whole society. All social influences are vertical.
No matter where they occur or of what particular
nature they may be — crime, prostitution, slavery, lit-
eracy, trade unions, beliefs, public schools, or denomi-
national variants in the religious organization, or sys-
tem of political theory and scientific concepts — they
all tend to influence the total structure j and they do
so by vertical penetration, so that any awareness, ap-
proval, denial, or rejection is evidence of the influ-
ence. And in the realm of fact — of mere physical
fact — the presence of the human beings who are the
carriers of the particular influence is also vertical. The
slave who attends his lady on her way to church, the
master’s son who finds a young colored mistress, with
or without the knowledge of his parents, the Negro

T^he Negro in the <Jlmencas 1 19

slave who sings his doleful songs and influences the
music, the rhythm, the range of musical awareness of
his masters, even against their will or, better still,
without their conscious knowledge of what is occur-
ring, afiFect the total culture.

The: e was always, in any slave socie^'V in this hemi-
sphere, a vertical flow from below, not merely of
ethical, religious, and purely cultural traits, but bio-
logically as well. The .lave always — the Negro
slave always — broke through the upper crust in some
measure and penetrated in greater or lesser degree,
witli or without the consent of the law, in spite of the
law, in spite of the social mores, in spite of every re-
straint, objection, condemnation, and punishment.
Biological as well as social mobility existed, and the
flow upward overcame distinctions not merely in caste
but in race. The law and the milieu differed sharply
in Latin America and the British West Indies and the
United States, but the end result has proved to be the
same in greater or lesser degree, and the direction is
unmistakable. The dynamics of human life and cul-
ture have proved more persistent and more continuous
than the theory or the law. Gilberto Freyre speaks of
the social and even the racial mobility of Brazil as
something that has proved acceptable, even as some-
thing of a matter of pride.*®^ Portuguese colonization
pi educed a fluid structure, making possible the trans-

Gilberto Freyre: O Mundo que o Portugues Criou (Rio de
Janeiro, 1940), p. 57.

120

Slave and Citizen:

mutation from class to class, from race to race, and
producing a new biological type, and new values in
human beauty. The mixture of races in Brazil was cer-
tainly persistent, and accepted, and broad in its reach.
The wealthy upper-class slave-owner with his se-
raglio of slave women on one side, and the poorer, iso-
lated fazendero in the backwoods on the other, both
participated in the universal process of miscegenation:

When I had finished, he invited me to his porch, where
he brought me some excellent coflFee, and set a mulatto of his
establishment on an opposite bench, to play on the guitar for
my amusement. He then called forth and introduced me to
his whole family. This consisted of two mothers, a black and
a white, and twelve children, of all sizes, sexes and colors;
some with woolly hair and dusky faces, some with sallow
skins and long black tresses. In a short time, they made up a
ball, and began to dance. It was opened by the youngest,
Luzia, a child of about four years old, with dark eyes, and
coal black hair. She was presently joined by a little black sis-
ter, and they commenced with a movement, resembling a
Spanish bolero, imitating admirably well the castanets with
their fingers and thumbs. The movement of the dance was
not very delicate; and the children, when they began, showed
a certain timidity and innate consciousness that they were
exhibiting before a stranger what was not proper; but by
degrees they were joined in succession by all the children,
boys and girls, up to the age of seventeen and eighteen, and
finally by the two mothers of the progeny. I never saw such
a scene. I was realizing what I had heard of the state of fami-
lies in the midst of woods, shut out from intercourse with all
other society, and forming promiscuous connexions with one
another, as if they were in an early age of the world, and had

I2I

*The Negro in the <tAmericas

no other human beings to attach themselves to. I had person-
ally known some, and I had heard of others, brothers and
sisters, who without scruple or sense of shame, lived together,
supporting in other respects the decencies of life; but here it
was carried beyond what I could have supposed possible, and
this precocious family displayed among themselves dances,
resembling what we have heard of ehe Otahf ilan Timordee.
I soon retired, but the sound of the guitar continued a long
time after.®*®

The process of miscegen ttion was part of the sys-
tem of slave' y, and not just of Brazilian slavery. The
biological transmutation from one race toward an-
other, the new type of beauty, the new race was being
evolved everywhere. The dynamics of race contact
and sex interest were stronger than prejudice, theory,
law, or belief. The difference was that in Brazil it was
accepted as a matter of course and has come to be, to
a certain extent, a point of pride.

A sense of racial vigor and cultural dynamism is
ascribed to the influence of this mixture of races. In
other places, in the British and French West Indies
and in the United States, it was frowned upon, for-
bidden by law, denied, and condemned, but it went on
just the same. Perhaps not to the same degree, but
who knows? And the long-run consequences are not
so greatly different as is presumed. In the British
West Indies miscegenation was widely practiced,
much to the chagrin of the righteous people. But it
went on, and even the “better” people — or their
Rev. R. Walsh, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 137.

122

Slave and Citizen:

sons — became a party to the process. The dynamics
of social life and human contact have an intimacy that
is beyond circumscription by the law. Even so staid
and formal a historian as Bryan Edwards finds him-
self confessing the fact: “The accusation generally
brought against the free people of colour, is the in-
continency of their women j of whom, such as are
young and have tolerable persons, are universally
maintained by white men of all ranks and conditions,
as kept mistresses. The fact is too notorious to be con-
cealed or controverted. . . .” The young men
brought over from Great Britain as overseers of the
plantations did not marry — they took colored mis-
tresses:

It is a well-known and notorious fact, that very few of the
white men in the West Indies marry, except a few profes-
sional men and some few merchants in the towns, and here
and there, in the country, a proprietor or large attorney.
Most of the merchants and shopkeepers in the towns, and the
whole of the deputy planters, (viz., overseers) in all parts of
the country, have what is called a housekeeper, who is their
concubine or mistress, and is generally a free woman of
colour; but the book-keepers, who are too poor and too de-
pendent to have any kind of establishment, generally take
some mulatto, or black female slave, from the estate where
they are employed, or live in a more general state of licen-
tiousness.

**• Bryan Edwards, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 221.
R. Bickell, op. cit., p. 104.

T^he Negro in the cAmericas 123

So notorious was the practice and so constant the fact
that a special term arose to describe the white man
who had become submerged on the plantation among
his Negro servants and concubines. He had become,
as the expression was, ^^a white Negro.”

This same mingling of the races a ad classes oc-
curred in the United States. The record is replete
with the occurrence, in spite of law, doctrine, and be-
lief. Every traveler in the :>iith before the Civil War
comments oa the widespread miscegenation, and a
whole volume could be filled with extracts like the
following:

If Joe Smith had been born and brought up in the Slave
States, he would never have thought of being the founder of
a sect. Among the million of female chattels in the South, the
supply would have been equal to the dt’^iand. You never hear
of free-love associations in the South. From the very struc-
ture of slave society there is no necessity for them. . . •
Amalgamation is increasing *t a horrible rate throughout the
slave st;)v and will contini e to increase while wealth and
luxur^ prevail in one class of the community and degrada-
tion in the other. There are many pure and virtuous men in
the South, who are, and who have been so, even from their
childhood; but . . . they labor under a temptation twofold
greater than persons who occupy the same social position in
the free states. It is admitted, by truthful men in the South,
that slavery is a source of unbounded licenti'»usness. ... It
is with pain that I express the conviction that one of the rea-

Mrs. A. C. Carmichael: Domestic Manners of the West
Indies (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co.; 1833),

P- 59 -

124 Slave and Citizen:

sons why wicked men in the South uphold slavery is the
facility which it affords for a licentious life. Negroes tell no
tales in courts of law of the violation by white men of colored
females.***

Miscegenation went on among all classes in the
community, and the racial and class mobility was as
characteristic in Southern slave states as in other slave
societies in this hemisphere. The mulatto in the
United States, like the mulatto in other places, is the
child of a white father and a dark mother, and it has
been said somewhere that in the United States there
are not more than ten per cent of the colored popula-
tion who have no admixture of white blood flowing
through their veins.

One of the many consequences of miscegenation
proved to be the inevitable differentiation between
the mulatto and the pure black, a differentiation that
differed in degree rather than in kind in the different
slave systems. It not only produced social distinction
in the colored part of the population, but brought a
part of the population closer to the master. Even in
the British West Indies it was customary not to put
mulattoes to work in the sugarcane fields, but rather
to keep them as house servants and put them to learn
skilled trades; and it was expected that a white man

*** Rev. J. D. Long, of Maryland, 1857, quoted by Arthur
W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family, from
Colonial Times to the Present (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co.;
1918), Vol. II, pp. 295-6.

Hhe^'EG'B^.o in the <Jtmericas 125

would free his mulatto child, and when he did not do
so, the father was “most justly detested, and held up
as a character anything but respectable.” In the
United States the opposition to manumission was so
great in many states that it was difficult for a white
father to free his children even if he wanted to. But
the fact is that such children were occasionally freed,
and there are hundreds of cases in the court records
of legal battles over th< inheritance of property by
the mulatto children of white fathers. The law did
not favor manumission, and the courts were perhaps
inclined to tavor the white claimant against the mu-
latto heir. But the fact remains that even in our sys-
tem it proved impossible to suppress completely the
natural tendency toward racial and class mobility.
Looking back, it seems perfectly clear that the mobil-
ily begun on a physical basis has gradually and inevi-
tably spread to the political, cultural, and social fields.
In the West Indies, Wi .ere the whites were so proud
and so arrogant and so sure of themselves, the racial
and social fluidity has proved almost complete.

The leaders of the community are often coloured men, the
children of the mixed marriages which many are wont to
deplore. . . .

The strata of coloured West Indian fiociety are already
complex. A few at the top, judges, barristers, doctors, what-
ever their shades of colour, could hold their own in any circle.

Mrs. A. C. Carmichael, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 91.

126 Slave Citizen:

A great many more are the intellectual equals or superiors
of their own white contemporaries.***

And the same has occurred in the French West
Indies:

On the other hand, the “little whites,” clerks, secretaries,
government officials, agents, are now thrust aside, unable to
compete with their Negro and mulatto rivals. Officials swarm
just as much in the English as in the other islands, and in vir-
tue of their very numbers the men of colour get elected to
most of the subordinate posts. In certain districts the whites,
refusing the administration of the sons of slaves, have com-
pletely disappeared. In this struggle for existence probably
more than one-fourth of the European element has been
eliminated since the middle of the century.

Their successful rivals are no longer full-blood Negroes,
but mulattoes or “people of colour.” Miscegenation has be-
come universal despite the unfavourable initial conditions and
the severe laws formerly interdicting such alliances. At pres-
ent the insular populations present every conceivable transi-
tion from sallow white to glossy black, though the prevalent
hue is a brown yellow, a fine bronze tint, or even that of
pale gold. Certainly this mixed race has not dech'ned, and the
half-caste creoles especially of Martinique and Dominica are
amongst the finest in the Antilles.**®

The achievement of the Negroes in the United
States has already been noticed. The import of all
this discussion is merely to point out the fact that the

W. M. Macmillan: Warning from the West Indies, op. cit.,

p. 48.

Elisee Reclus: The Universal Geografhy, edited by A. H.
Keane (London: J. S. Virtue and Co.), Vol. IIIj p. 4^z,

a he Negro in the i 4 mericas 127

institution of slavery was inevitably mobile, that it
had a logic of its own broader than any system of law,
or custom, tradition, or belief. What the law and tra-
dition did was to make the social mobility easy aad
natural in one place, difficult and "low and painful in
another. In Brazil and Spanish America the law, the
church, and custom put few impediments in the way
of vertical mobility of race and class, and in some
measure favored it. In the British, French, and United
States slave systems the law attempted to fix the pat-
ten* and stratify the social classes and the racial
grvups. Buc the law failed. The Haitian rebellion,
the Civil War in the United States, and the abolition
of slavery in the British West Indies are all part of
the same process.

A stratified society, at least in terms of the experi-
ence of this hemisphere, that will not leave open a
channel for growth, change, and modulation will be
changed by force. So it happened. But more impor-
tant than that is the fact so clearly revealed that the
underlying social process was similar under slavery
in this hemisphere regardless of the ajgis under which
it originated. Physical proximity, slow cultural inter-
twining, the growth of a middle group that stands in
experience and equipment between the lower and the
upper class, and the slow process of moral identifica-
tion work their way against all seemingly absolute
sys<-cms of values and prejudices. Society is essentially
dynamic, and while the mills of God grind slow, they

128 Slave Citizen:

grind exceeding sure. Time — the long time — will
draw a veil over the white and black in this hemi-
sphere, and future generations will look back upon the
record of strife as it stands revealed in the history of
the people of this New World of ours with wonder
and incredulity. For they will not understand the is-
sues that the quarrel was about.

INDEX

Abbot, Rev. Abiel, 6 in
Abolition of slavery, 29, 42, X03-
13, 116, 127
Acis of Jamaica 168
qu^tedy 72 n, 84 n
Advertisements of slaves, 77-80
African migration, 5, 14— 15>

35 5 see also Slave trade
Alaska, 5, 14 (table)

Alexandria (D. C.) Gazette ^

quoted^ 77

Alfonso the Wise, 45 and n
Aigarves, 44

American Dilemma^ An (Myr-
dal); 88 n

American Slave Code^ The
(Goodell), 74 w, 75 76 w,

78 w, 7^ w, 86 87 96 «;

quoted^ 77’"8, 79
American slave system, 65 w, 88,
127 j see also Negro in the
U. S. and the British W»‘3it In-
dies

A mbferdam, 2 1

Anales de la Bibliotecc^ 12 n

Andalusia, 44

Angola, 16, 30, 31, 64

Antigua, 84

Antilles, 6, 14 (table), 15,

126

A rcaya, 131*

Argentina, 8-13, 14 (table), 41,
56-7

Arguim, 14-15

Afiontic and Slavery^ The
(Wyndham), 17 83 »,

quoted, 83

Balbi, 8 n

Bancroft, Frederic C., 79 8 c n,

82^7; quoted, 78-9, 82
Bandinel, James, 33 77
Baptist C\'jrch, 87-8
Barbados, 6, 66, 83, 84
Barter, 16—17, 19, 21
B'fhlioteca de Ctdtura Peruana,

tin

Bickell, R., 8477, 122 71 ; quoted,
84, 122

Black, John, 54 71
Bolivar, Simon, 56
Bolivia, 14 (table)

Booth, Charles, 84 77; quoted, 84
Brazil: An Interf relation
(Freyre) , 3 and ti, 4 71
Brazil and La Plata: the Per^-
'onal Record of a Cruise
(Stewart), 6077,* quoted, 59-
60

Brazil and the Brazilians (Kid-
der and Fletcher) , 54 77
Brazil, tfie River Plate, and the
Falkland Islands (Hadfield),
31 n

Brazilian Empire, 4
Bridgeport, 21

British Honduras, 14 (table)
British slave system, 6$ n, 88,
127; see also Negro in the
U. S. and the British West In-
dies

British slave traffic, 17—20, 32,
33

British Slavery and Its Abolition
(Mathieson), 20 n, 33 n, 34 77,

1

Index

11

British Slavery and Its Abolition
{^continued)

S7 n, 65 n, 66 n, 85 n, too n;
quoted, 5 3 «

British West Indies, 6—7, 19-20,
30, 37, 38, 68, 69, 82-6, 88,
93—6, 100, loi, 104, 1 19,
1 2 1— 3, 124, 125—6, 127J see
also Negro in the U. S. and
the British West Indies
Brookes, the, 23 »

Brookings Institution, 7 n
Brougham, Henry, 3 1 «, 3 3 ^
Buchanan, President, quoted,
34

Buenos Aires, 9-13, 39
Buenos Ayres and the Provinces
of the Rio de la Plata (Par-
ish), 12 «

Calabar, 17

Calhoun, Arthur W., t%\n
Calhoun, John C., quoted, 107-
9

Calogeras, Pandi'a, 3 1 w
Canada, 5, 14 (table)

Canary Islands, 16
Cape Bojador, 15
Capitalism and Slavery (Wil-
liams), 20 n

Carlyle, A. J., 46 n, 48 n
Carlyle, R. W., 46 48 »

Carmichael, Mrs. A. C., 123
12$ n; quoted, 125
Carranca y Trujillo, Raul, 53 «
Carta al Padre Comini de la
Comfahia de Jesus** (Gerva-
soni), ion

^^Carta del Padre Cayetano CaU
taneo, ahril, 1730** {La Re-
vista de Buenos Aires), ton

^^Carta del Padre Chome, Seft.
1730, Missionero de la Com-
fahia de Jesus, al Padre Van-
thiennen, de la Misma Com-
pahia,** quoted, io«— 11 n
^*Cartas Edijicantes, y Curiosas,
Escritas de las Misiones Es-
tr anger as, y de Levante for
Algunos Missioneros de la
Comfahia de Jesus,** quoted,
10 nr~\ I n

Catholic Church, the, 53, 57, 62-
5 > 98-9

Cattaneo, Father Cayetano, 10 «;
quoted, 10

Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff,
71 81 w, \o\ n

Charleston Mercury, the, 81 w;
quoted, 8 1

Child, Sir Joshua, 19
Chile, 9, 13, 14 (table)

Chome, Father, 10— 115 quoted,
ton-i I n
Christ, 47

Christianity and slavery, ii,
43 w, 44-8, 49-50, 53 > S 7 >
75-^> 82-90, 92, 95,
97, 98-9, 102-3, ii7> iiS
Chronicle of the Discovery and
Conquest of Guinea, The (de
Azurara) , quoted, 43 w
Cicero, 48} quoted, 45—6
Civil War (U. S.), 109-13, 123,
127

Cobb, Thomas R. R., 6% n, 70 n,
7Z^y 74 7b n, 79 «, 96 w,
1 01 n, quoted, 70, 73, loi
Coleccion de Documentos Ine-
ditos. Relatives al descubri-
miento, conquista y organiza-
cion de las Antiguas Posesiones

Index

111

Coleccton de Documentos Ine-
ditos {continued^

Esfanolas de America y Oce-
antUy sacados de los Archivos
del ReinOy y muy esfecialmente
de IndiaSy 1 5 «

Colombia, 5, 13, 14 (table), 56
Com^ dation of the Messages and
Papers of the PresidentSy
S78g-i8g7y A (Richardson),
34^; quotedy 34
Concilios Provinciates, Prm
y 8egunloy Mexico y En los
Ahos de issS y ^S^Sy ^3 »
Cong^o, 31, 32

iitieras, Rodrigo, 44
Convent of Saint Theresa, 1 1
Cordoba, ii

Corinthians, 47 quotedy 47

Corrientcs, 1 2

Costa Rica, 14 (table)

Courts, <;o-2, 73, 94-5
Cuba, 7, 29, 30, 33, 34, 37i 4i>
S3 n, 54 and n, 57, 61, 63, 89,
91, 92, 99-100, 104
Curprao, 7

Tana, Richard Henry, Jr., 54 »
Danish slave system, the, 6$ n
Davin, Father Diego, lofi
Davis, Benjamin, 78
De Aguirre, Don Francisco,
quotedy 12

De Azevedo, J. Lucio, 14 w, \$n
De Azurara, Gomes Eanncs,
quotedy 43

De Las Casas, Fray Bartolome,
\^n

De Moussy, V. Martin, 1 1 ana n
De Pons, F. R^, 99 and H
De Valladolid, Juan, 44

De Vargas y Ponce, D. J., 45 n
Demerara, 65

Description de la Con^

federation Argentine (de

Moussy) , \\n

Dew, ^homas R., c i n-y quotedy
81

**Diario .te Don Francisco de
Aguirre*^ {Anales de la Bu
hlioteca ) , 1 2 »

Dias, Henrique, 91
“Dicky Sam,” 18 «, 19 33»

Diplomatic Correspondence of
the United States (Manning),
30 quotedy 90 n
Diplomatic Relations Between
the United States and Brazil
(Hill), 26 27 », 33

quotedy 25-6, 27
Documents Illustrative of the
History of the Slai\)e Trade to
^ merica (Donnan) , x 8
19 w, 24 n; quotedy 23 rSy 43 n
Domestic Manners of the West
Indies ( Carmichael ) , 1 2 3
125 w; quotedy 125
Dominica, 126
Dominican Order, 92
Donnan, Elizabeth, \%ny 19 n,
24 ny 43 n

Donoso, Ricardo, tjn
Dutch Caribbean Islands, 7
Dutch slave system, 65 »

Ecuador, 5, 13, 14 (table)
Edinburgh Re^/teWy 38 »
Edwards, Bryan, 14^1, 2811,

Zony 32», 33«, 85«, 9411,
122 ni quotedy 94, 122
Egypt, 3*

£1 Salvador, 14 (table)

IV

Index

Emancipation, see Abolition of
slavery

Enter f rise y 19

Ephesians, 47 quoted y 47

Episcopal Church, 83, 87-8
ifocas de Portugal Economico
(de Azevedo), 14 15 ^

Equality of human nature, 45—8
Espanola, 15

Essai statistique sur le Royaume
de Portugal (Balbi), %n
E studios de Sociologia Venezue-
lana ( Arcaya) , 1 3 w
Eurofean Possessions in the Cctr-
ibbean AreUy The (Platt,
Wright, Weaver, and Fair-
child), 7 n

Everett, Edward, 89 »

Ewbank, Thomas, 4 61 n;
quotedy 4, 60-1

Fairchild, Johnson E., 7 n
Ferdinand, 44
Fernando Po, 1 6

Fiske, Amos K., 30 w, 83 w;
quotedy 83

Flanders, Ralph Betts, 87 88 «

Fleetwood, Bishop, quotedy 83
Fletcher, J. C., 54
Foreign Policy Association, 7 n
Formacdo Historica do Brazil
(Calogeras) , 3 1
Fortune y the, 19
Franciscan Order, 92
Freedmen, 8, 12, 56-7, 66, 68,
75 86, 92-3, 94 - 7 >

104, 105-6} see also Manu-
mission

Freedom by will and testament,
5*» 52, 58, 70

French slave system, 65 w, 127

French West Indies, 7, 30, 121,
126

Freyre, Gilberto, 3 and «, 4 and
If, 1 1 9 and n

Galatians, 47 w; quotedy 47
“General Descriptive History of
Liverpool, A,” 1 8 «
Gervasoni, Father Carlos, 10 n;
quotedy 9-10

Gillespie, Major Alexander, 12
and n

Gleanings and Remarks y Col-
lected during Many Months of
Residence at Buenos Ayres and
<mthin the Uffer Country
(Gillespie), 12 »

Gold Coast, 16, 17
Gonzales, Natalico, 1 3 «
Goodell, William, 74 w, 75 w,
76 w, 78 w, 79 86 w, 87

96 n

Grain Coast, 16
Greenland, 5, 14 (table)
Grenada, 6
Guadeloupe, 7
Guatemala, 14 (table), 41
Guiana, French, Dutch, and
British, 5, 8, 14 (table)

Hadfield, William, 33 w
Haiti, 7—8

Haitian rebellion, 127
Hayden, James J., 71 w
Helps, Arthur, 44 n
“Hernandarias de Saavedra”
(Trelles), qn

Hill, Lawrence F., 26 w, 27 w,
33 «

Hisfanit American Historical
Review, 3 1 »

Index

V

Historia de la Esclavitud de la
Raza Africana en el Nuevo
Mundo y en esfecial en los
Raises Americo-^Hisfanos (Sa-
co), 53 89 "i

quoted^ 53, 89

Historia de la Revoludon de la
Refublica de Colombia (Res-
tropo) , 1 3 »

Historia de las Indias (de Las
Casas), 14 ff

Historia Economica do Bras c
1500-/^20 (Simonsen), %n
Historical Collections (Rush-
worth), 101 n; quotedy loi
H^'>*oryy Civil and Commercialy
of the British Colonies in the
West Indies, The (Edwards),
28 n, 32 f», 33 n

History of Brazil, A (Southey),
57 65 »

History of Medieval Political
Theory in the West, A (R. W.
and A. J. Carlyle) , 46 n, 48 n;
quoted, 45—6, 48
Historv of St, Domingo (^. d-*
wards), 14 85 w, 94 .•J,
' 22 n; quoted, 94, 12^
History of the Spanish Inquisi-
tion, A (Lea) , 45 n
Holidays, 61
Honduras, 14 (table)

Howard, John Henry, 94 n
Humboldt, Alexander, 5, 6 and
n, 30 w, 37 54 5^n

n^'^^al entry, 9
Illega> traffic, 29
Indians, 5, 8, 9, 41, 52, 63, 66-
7, 90, III If

Industrial Revolution, 20

Inquiry into the Colonial Policy
of the European Powers, An
(Brougham), 3111, 3311
Inquiry into the Law of Negro
Slavery in the United States of
Amer^^a, An (Cobb), 68 if,
70 If, 73 If, 741/, 76 If, 79
9611, iC' n; quoted 70, 73,
101

^Hnstruccion que el ^‘ 7 hado dr
Buenos Aires remite d su apo-
derado en Madrid'* {La Re-
vista de Buenos Aires), qn
Isabella, 44

Island of Cuba, The (Hum-
boldt), 6 If, 30 If, 37 If, 54 If
Ivory Coast, 16, 17

Jamaica, 6, 37, 72, 84, 94 j As-
sembly of, 84 and If
Jesus, Society of, 9, 10, 92
Jews 44-5, 49 -' 5 o
John C, Calhoun (von Holst),
108 If, 109 If

Johnston, Sir Harry, 8 if, 29 if,
54 If, 66 If, 90 If; quoted, 90
Jones, James, 23 if
Journal of a West India Propri-
etor, iSts-iy (Lewis), 3811,
95 quoted, 38, 95
Journal of Negro History, 3711
Judicial Cases Concerning Amer-
ican Slavery and the Negro,
with additions by James J.
Hayden (Catterall), yin,
81 If, xox If
Justinian Code, 45

Keane, A. H., 12611
Kephart, George, 77
Kidder, D, P., 54 if

Index

vi

Koster, Henry, $6 n, 57 fi, 63 f»,
64. n, 91 and 92 ff .

Lady of the Rosary, 64
Language, lo-ii and n, 41,
90

Law, see Slave laws
“Laws of Jamaica,” 94 «

Laws of Jamaica^ Passed by the
Assembly and Confirmed by
His Majesty^ in Council Afril
/7, 1684^ The^ 72 quoted^

72

Laws of the British Colonies in
the West Indies and Other
Parts of America (Howard),
94 «

“Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminan-
tes, El” (Biblioteca de CuU
tura Peruana ) , 1 1 «

Lea, Henry Charles, 45 n
Leslie, Charles, 35 w, 72/1
Letters on South America, Com^
^rising Travels on the Banks
of the Parana and Rio de
la Plata (J. P. and W. P. Rob-
ertson), i^n; quoted, 12-

Letters Written in the Interior of
Cuba (Abbot), 61 n
Lewis, M. G., Z^n, 95 quot-
ed, 38, 95

Life in Brazil, or the Land of the
Cocoa and the Palm (Ew-
bank), ^n, Sin; quoted, 4,
60--1

Lisbon, 15, 29, 44, 91, 92
Liverpool, 17-19, 21
Liverpool and Slavery, by a gen*
nine “Dicky Sam” (“Dicky
Sam”), 18 n, 19 n, 33 n

Loanda, 32

Long, Rev. J, D., 1 24 quoted,
123-4

Lopez, Gregorio, 45 fi
Lottery, the, 19
Louisa, the, 19

Macmillan, W. M., 6n, 126 fS;

quoted, 125—6
Madeira Islands, 16
Manning, William R., 30 n,

go n

Manumission, 50—62, 65—71, 82,
9 i> 94 - 5 > 99 > 104, 105-10,
112, 125

Marques de Osomo don Ambro^
sio Higgins, ly 20-^1801, El
(Donoso) , 1 3 »

Martin, Percy Alvin, 31 w, 56
58 n

Martinique, 7, 126
Martins, J. P. Oliveira, 14^,
15 w, 30 31 w, 32 »

Maryland Reports, tt n; quoU
ed, 76-7

Mathieson, William Law, 20 n,

33 ", 34 ", 57 ", 65",

66 n, 85 100 n; quoted,

53 "

Mawc, John, 39, z%n
Mercado, Father Thomas, 62
Mestizos, 8, 66—7
Methodist Church, 87
Mexico, 5, 14 (table), 54, 63,

90

Military service, 55, 56-7, 90-1,
92, 94, 9^

Miscegenation, 4, 120-6
Missionary stations, 84
Moderne Kafitalismus, Der
(Sombart), 30f>« 36^

Index vii

Moon, 43 n, 44-5, 49-50

Moravians, 84

Mulattoes, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14
(table), 66-7, 68, 91, 95,
124—6

Myrdal, Gunnar,

Nantes, / 1

Narrative of Travels on the Anu-
azon and Rio Negro (Wal-
lace), 6^n

Negro: acceptance of, 4, 10/.
ii3-28i accommodation ot,
41 j bramiing of, 28 j in Bra-
zilj 3~4i 55 85 14 (table), 29,
3*> 39» 4^ 54i 565 57> S**
59-61, 64, 90-3, 100, 104,
1 1 8, 1 19-21, i27i as a colo-
nizer, 39—42 j importance of,
culturally, 40 j literacy of, 86,
97, 1 1 2 1 T 3 J and marriage,

37» 495 56, 64, 75-3, 82, 85,
96, 98} moral and ethical
standing of, 42-128 j mortal-
ity of, in the Americas, 3 5-6 5
and punishment, 26, 40, 52,
56, *-3. 96} identification ^f,
t' ith slave, 66-9, 75 w, 97’"3,
103, 106-7, iiiw— ii2«; as
social and cultural force, 39—
42, 116-28} tastes of, 17} in
U, S, and British West Indies,
3-4. S. 6, 14 (table), 4*-3i
65-88, 93-7, 100-28} as

worker, 10, 11, 12, 39-405 5 S'"
61, 91

Negro clerg}, 50, 86, 90

Nwgr"^ family, 36-8, 64, 75-82,
85, 98-9, 102

Negro in Brazil ^ The (Ramos),
61 n

Negro in the New Worldy The
(Johnston), 8 «, 29 w, 54^1,
66 n, 90 n; quoted^ 90
Negros EsclavoSy Los (Ortiz),
54 w, 55 «5 56 57 59

100 »

Nevis, 6

New and Tract Account of Ja-
maica, A (Leslie), 35/7, 72 n;
quoted, 35, 72 and n
New Orleans Bee, quoted, 77
New Testament, 46
Nicaragua, 14 (table), 44
Notices of Brazil (Walsh) , 25 n,
60 n, 121 »,* quoted, 24—5,
120-1

O Brazil e as Colonias Portu-
guezas (Martins), 14^, i5ti,
30 71, 31 n, 32 n
O Mundo que o Portugues Criou
(Freyre), 11971
Onesimus, 47

“Opinion of Daniel Dulaney,
Esq., Attorney Gene'-al of
Maryland” (Maryland Re-
ports), 77 71; quoted, 76-7
Ortiz, Fernando, 5477, 5577,

56 77, 57 77, 59 77, 100 77
Ovandi, Nicholas, 15

Palmares, Negro Republic of, 91
Panama, 14 (table)

Paraguay, 13, 14 (table), 56
Parish, Su Woodbine, quoted,
12

Pattee, Richard, 01 n
Perry, Captain, 23 ti
P eru, 5, 9, i3> 14 (table), 41
Philemon, 47 77; quoted, 47
Phillips, U. B., 80 71

Vlll

Index

Pillage of Negro villages, 21, 36
Pitman, Frank Wesley, 37 «
Pizarro, Fernando, 44
Plantation and Frontier (Phil-
lips), Sow,* quoted^ 80
Plantation Slavery in Georgia
(Flanders), 87 w, 88 »

Platt, Raye R., 7 n
Poblacion indigena de America^
desde 1492 hasta la actualidady
La (Rosenblatt), 14 (table)
Political Esiay on the Kingdom
of New Sfain (Humboldt),
54W, 56 w
Polygamy, 35-6
Pope Benedict XIV, 62
Pope Gregory XVI, 6z
Pope Paul III, 62
Pope Pius II, 62
Pope Urban VIII, 62
Portugal, slavery in, 14—16, 44,
1 16

Portugal (Stephens), 44 w
Portuguese slave system, 65 w,
885 see also Portugal, slavery
in, and slave, the, in Latin
America

Portuguese slave traffic, 16, 29,
3 ^

Practical Treatise of the Law of
Slavery y A (Wheeler), 79 w;
quoted, 79, 80

Presbyterian Synod of South Car-
olina and Georgia, 86—7
Presumption of slavery, 685 see
also the Negro, identification
of, with slave

Primer Censo, de la Refublica
Argentina, 11 n

Problems of the New Cuba (For-
eign Policy Association) , 7 n

Proceso y Formacion de la CuU
tura Paraguaya (Gonzales) ,
13 n

Progress of Slavery (Weston),
82 n

Puerto Rico, 7, 34

Quakers, 83-4

Racial conflict, 114-15
Ramos, Arthur, 61 n
Randolph, Thomas Jefferson,
quoted, 80—1

Real Cedula de Su Magestad so-
bre la Educacion, Trato, y
Ocupaciones de los Esclavos,
en Todos sus Dominios de In-
dias, e Islas Filipinos, Baxo
las Reglas que se Expresan,
52—3 and n

Reclus, Elisee, 126 n; quoted,
126

Reconstruction, no
Refugee Settlement in the Do-
minican Republic (Brookings
Institution), 7 n
Religious fraternities, 64-5, 92
Restrepo, Jose Manuel, 1 3 w
Review of the Debate in the Vir-
ginia Legislature of 18 and
1832 (Dew), 8iw,‘ quoted,
81

Revista Chilena de Historia y Ge-
ogrdfica, 1 3 w

Revista de Buenos A ires, La, 9 n,
10 n

Revista de Historia de America,
53 "

Richardson, James D., 34 n
Right of search, 34

Index

IX

Rinchori) Dieudonne P., 29 w,
30 ", 31 ", 3i", 44"

Rio de Janeiro, 33, 39, S9-61,

91

Rio d’Oro, 16
Robertson, J. P., 13 »
Robertson, W. P., 1 3 n
Rosenblatt, Angel, 14 (table)
Rushworth, John, 101 ti; quot^

edf loi

Russia, 101

Saco, Jose Antonio, 53^, 62;,,
6 3 77, 89/^; quoted^ 5 3
St. Christopher, 66, 84.

S- Kitts, 6

Saint Paul, 46-8 j quoted^ 47
St. Thomas, the island of, 16
San Martin, Jose de, 57
San Thome, 29
Santo Domingo, 7, 33
Savannah River Baptist Associa-
tion, 75-6

Scelle, George, 44 w
Self-redemption, 50, 51,

61, 68, 74
Sen^ 48

acgal River, 16
Scnegambia, 1 5
Sierra Leone, 16

'S/teste Paritdas del Rey Alfonso el
SabiOf Cortejadas con Variod
Codices Antiguos for la Real
Academia de la Historia, y
Glosadas for el Lie, Gregorio
Lofez, del Consejo Real de In^
sias de 6. M, Nueva Edicion^
; ecedida del Eiogiu del Rey
Don Alfonso for D, J. de Var^
gas y Ponce, y Enriquecida
con su Testamento Politico^

Sieste Partidas del Rey A Ifonso el
Sabio (continued)

Las, 48-5 2 i quoted^ 45 " 51
Simoens, Father Garcia, 29-30
Simonsen, Roberto C., 8 and n
Sketch of the La«os Pertaining to
Slavery in the Several States of
the United States of America,
A (Stroud), 67 w, 6 % n, 70
7177, 72 «, 73 77, 7«>"> 77 "j
97 77 ; quoted, 76-7
Slave, the: in Alabama, 70 j in
Argentina, 8-13, 56-75 as

breeding animal, 36—9, 80-25
as chattel, 79, 82, 98, 103,
104, 117, 1235 in Florida, 68 5
in Georgia, 66, 70, 72, 74-6,
86-7, 965 in Kentucky, 68,
70) 75> 79 > in Latin America,
4-16, 30-41, 52-65, 69, 82,
84, 88-93, 97-100, 104, 105-
110, 115—21, 1275 in Loui-
siana, 74, 79 5 in Maryland,
67-8, 70, 76, 79~8 o> ^ 7> 96 i
in Mississippi, 66, 68, 70, 71,
75, 765 in Missouri, 755 and
murder, 72-3, 95 i in North
Carolina, 68, 70—1, 74, 76,
965 and property, 79, 113, and
set Self-redemption 5 sources
of, 16—17, 21, 30-25 in South
Carolina, 66-7, 70, 72-3, 74,
79, So, 86-8, 96-75 in Ten-
nessee, 71, 72, 75 5 in Virginia,
67-S, yo, 71, 75, 80-1, 116
Slave Coast, 17
Slave “factory/' 14, 22, 32
Slave laws, 37, 42-5 7) 65-86,
92—103, 116

Slave markets, 15, 285 see also
slave “factory”

Index

X

Slave ships, described, 22-8, 34-
5

Slave society, 117—23
Slave trade, 8, 14-38, 40, 62-35
abolished, 27, 29, 30-1, 33,
34, 38, 80, 84, 855 African
accomplices in, 215 cruelty of,
20—9} mortality in, 28-9;
profits from, 17-20, 33
Slave-Trading in the Old South
(Bancroft), 79 81 82W;

quoted^ 78-9, 81, 82
“Slavery and Abolition in Bra-
zil” (Martin in the Hisfanic
American Historical Review) ^
31 n, $6 n

“Slavery on British West In-
dian Plantations in the Eight-
eenth Century” (Pitman in the
Journal of Negro History ) ,
37 w

Smith, Joseph, 123
Social History of the American
Familyy from Colonial Times
to the Presenty A (Calhoun),
124 w; quotedy 123-4
Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel, the, 83
Solor, Domingo Amunategui,
13 w

Sombart, Werner, 30 fi, 36 n
Some Account of the Trade in
Sleeves from Africa (Bandi-
nel), 33 »

Southern states, 3, 5, 66-8, 70—
82, 86—8, 96-7, 107—11, 123—

4

Southey, Robert, 57 65 »

Spain, slavery in, 44
Spaniards, 10, 48, 625 as slaves,
44

Spanish Conquest in America,
The (Helps), 44 n
Spanish slave system, 65 w, 84, 88
Spanish traditional law, 455 see
also Slave laws
Stephens, H. Morse, 44 n
Stewart, C. S., 60 n; quoted, 59-
60

Stock companies, 33-4
Stroud, George M., Sy n, 6% n,
70 w, 71 n, 72 w, 73 w, 76
97 w

Thrasher, J. S., 6 n
To Cuba and Back (Dana),
54 »

Traite et Vesclavage des Congo-
lais far les Eurofeens, La
(Rinchon), 29 w, 30 n, 31 n,
32 n, 44 »

Traite Negrihe, La (Scelle),
44 w

^^Trata de Negros en Chile, La*^
(Solor) y 13 n

Travels in Brazil (Koster), 56
ST n, 63 n, 6^n, 91 n, 92 n
Travels in the Interior of Brazil
(Mawe), 58 »

Travels in South America (de
Pons) , 99 n

Trelles, Manuel Ricardo, 9 n
Trinidad, 6
Tucuman, 9, 11

United States Foreign Relations,
30 n

Universal Geography, The (Re-
clus), 126W; quoted, 126
Upshur, Abel P., quoted, 89
90 n

Uruguay, 14 (table)

Index

XI

Vanthiennen, Father, ion
Venezuela, 5, 13, 14 (table), 39,
56, 90, 92, 99, 104
Virgin Islands, 6
Von Holst, Dr. H., io8 w,
109 n

Wallac"^, Alfred R., 64 n
Walsh, Rev. R., 25 w, &on,

III w; quoted^ 24—5, 120— I
Warning from the West Indies
(Macmillan), 6 126
quote dy 125— 6
Weaver, John C., 7 n
West Indies, 5—8, 33, 36, 39, 41
West IndieSy The (Fiske), 30
83 W; quotedy 83

West Indies as They Are, The
(Bickell), 84 122 quot^

edy 84, 122

“West Indies as They Were and
Are, The” (^Edinburgh Re-
view) > 3 8 w

Westermann, William L., 1 1 o «
Weston, 82

Wheeler, Jacob D., 80 »

William and Mary College, 81
Williams, Eric, 20 n
Wright, John K., 7 n
Wyndham, Hon. H. A., 1 7

83 92 n

Zachary Macauley (Booth),

84 n; quoted, 84

This book has been set in a modem adaftation of a type de-
signed by WUliam Caslon, the first (^i6g2-‘iy66)y greatest
of English letter founders^ The Caslon face, an artistic^ easily
read tyfe^ has had two centuries of ever increasing fofularity
in our own country — it is of interest to note that the first
cofies of the Declaration of Indefendence and the first fafer
currency distributed to the citizens of the new-born nation
were f tinted in this tyfe face.

The book was composed ^ frinted^ and bound by The Plimp-
ton Press^ Norwood, Massachusetts. Typography by James
Hendrickson. Binding baud on original designs by W. A.
Dwiggins.